The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story

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V

THE INHERITORS

THE INHERITORS

AN EXTRAVAGANT STORY

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

AND

FORD M. HUEFFER

** Sardanapalus builded seven cities in a day.
Let us eat^ drink and sleepy for to-^marraw wi die!

>* ■m -^

I

w ^

OASDEN OTY NBW YOSK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

1920

i

,' ^f

Copyright^ iQOlf by

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & C6»

• • • •

• » • •

_ * •

•• • . • . • .

ENGLISH 1

C7SY

^af

TO
BOi(.YS AND CHRISTINA

445418

4 « J

•* _ *

•« 4

^** *•••-» •

THE INHERITORS

CHAPTER ONE

«

DEAS/' she said. " Oh, as for ideas-
"Well?" I hazarded, "as for ideas-

99

»

We went through the old gateway and I
cast a glance over my shoulder. The noon sun
was shining over the masonry, over the little
saints' effigies, over the little fretted canopies,'
the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.

" There," I said, pointing toward it, " doesn't
that suggest something to you? "

She made a motion with her head — ^half nega-
tive, half contemptuous.

" But," I stuttered, " the associations — ^the
ideas — the historical ideas "

She said nothing.

"Yoii Americans,'* I began, but her smile
stopped me. It was as if she were amused at the
utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits

[I]

THE INHERITORS

• • •

bVih€ datugKters of the day. It was the smile of
a person who is confident of superseding one
fatally.

In conversations of any length one of the par-
ties assumes the superiority — superiority of rank,
intellectual or social. In this conversation she, if
she did not attain to tacitly acknowledged tem*
peramental superiority, seemed at least to claim
it, to have no doubt as to its ultimate according.
I was unused to this. I was a talker, proud of
my conversational powers.

I had looked at her before; now I cast a side-
ways, critical glance at her. I came out of my
moodiness to wonder what type this was. She
had good hair, good eyes, and some charm. Yes.
And something besides — a something — z some-
thing that was not an attribute of her beauty.
The modelling of her {ace was so perfect and so
delicate as to produce an effect of transparency,
yet there was no suggestion of frailness; her
glance had an extraordinary strength of life. Her
hair was fair and gleaming, her cheeks coloured
as if a warm light had fallen on them from some-
where. She was familiar till it occurred to you
that she was strange.

[2]

CHAPTER ONE

'* Which way arc you going? " she asked.

" I am going to walk to Dover/* I answered.

" And I may come with you? '*

I looked at her — ^intent on divining her in
that one glance. It was of course impossible.
" There will be time for analysis/' I thought.

" The roads are free to all/' I said. " You are
not an American? "

She shook her head. No. She was not an
Australian either^ she came from none of the Brit-
ish colonies.

"You are not English/* I affirmed. "You
speak too well." I was piqued. She did not
answer. She smiled again and I grew angry. In
the cathedral she had smiled at the verger's com-
mendation of particularly abominable restora-
tionSy and that smile had drawn me toward her,
had emboldened me to offer deferential and con-
demnatory remarks as to the plaster-of-Paris
mouldings. You know how one addresses a
young lady who is obviously capable of taking
care of herself. That was how I had come across
her. She had smiled at the gabble of the cathe-
dral guide as he showed the obsessed troop, of
which we had formed units, the place of martyr-

[3l

THE INHERITORS

dom of Blessed Thomas, and her smile had had
just that quality of superseder's contempt. It had
pleased me then; but, now that she smiled thus
past me — ^it was not quite at me — ^in the crooked
highways of the town, I was irritated. After all,
I was somebody; I was not a cathedral verger.
I had a fancy for myself in those days — ^ fancy
that solitude and brooding had crystallised into a
habit of mind. I was a writer with high — ^with the
highest — ^ideals. I had withdrawn myself from the
world, lived isolated, hidden in the country-side,
lived as hermits do, on the hope of one day doing
something — of putting greatness on paper. She
suddenly fathomed my thoughts: "You write,"
she affirmed. I asked how she knew, wondered
what she had read of mine — there was so little.

" Are you a popular author? " she asked.

"Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know
that."

" You would like to be? "

"We should all of us like," I answered;
** though it is true some of us protest that we aim
for higher things."

" I sec," she said, musingly. As far as I could
tell she was coming to some decision. With an

[4]

CHAPTER ONE

instinctive dislike to any such proceeding as re-
garded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown
thoughts.

" But, really — " I said, " I am quite a common-
place topic. Let us talk about yourself. Where
do you come from? "

It occurred to me again that I was intensely
unacquainted with her type. Here was the same
smile — ^as far as I could see, exactly the same
smile. There are fine shades in smiles as in
laughs, as in tones of voice. I seemed unable to
hold my tongue.

" Where do you come from? " I asked. " You
must belong to one of the new nations. You
are a foreigner, Fll swear, because you have such
a fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that
you might almost be a Prussian. But it is obvi-
ous that you are of a new nation that is begin-
ning to find itself."

" Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is
what you mean," she said.

" The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was
determined not to give myself away. " Where
in the world do you come from?" I repeated.
The question, I was quite conscious, would have

is]

THE INHERITORS

sufficed, but in the hope/ 1 suppose, of establish-
ing my intellectual superiority, I continued:

" You know, fair play's a jewel. Now Fm
quite willing to give you information as to myself.
I have already told you the essentials — ^you ought
to tell me something. It would only be fair play.**

" Why should there be any fair play? " she
asked.

" What have you to say against that? " I said.
*' Do you not number it among your national
characteristics? "

" You really wish to know where I come
from? "

I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

'' Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds.
I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come
like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of

wind through a breathless day. " What

what ! " I cried.

" I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."

I recovered my equanimity with the thought
that I had been visited by some stroke of an ob-
scure and unimportant physical kind.

" I think we must have been climbing the hill
too fast for me," I said, '* I have not been very

[6]

CHAPTER ONE

well. I missed what you said." I was certainly
out of breath.

" I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension,"
she repeated with admirable gravity.

" Oh, come," I expostulated, " this is playing
it rather low down. You walk a convalescent out
of breath and then propound riddles to him."

I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my
inclination to expand. Instead, I looked at her.
I was beginning to understand. It was obvious
enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land,
in a land that brought out her national charac-
teristics. She must be of some race, perhaps
Semitic, perhaps Sclav — of some incomprehen-
sible race. I had never seen a Circassian, and
there used to be a tradition that Circassian
women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so
on. What was repelling in her was accounted for
by this difference in national point of view. One
is, after all, not so very remote from the horse.
What one does not understand one shies at —
finds sinister, in fact. And she struck me as sin-
ister.

" You won't tell me who you are? " I said.
" I have done so," she answered.

[7]

THE INHERITORS

" If you expect me to believe that you inhabit
a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken.
You are, really."

She turned round and pointed at the city.

" Look!" she said.

We had climbed the western hill. Below our
feet, beneath a sky that the wind had swept
clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl,
shallow, filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths.
And above the mass of red roofs there soared the
golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was
a vision, the last word of a great art. I looked
at her. I was moved, and I knew that the glory
of it must have moved her.

She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I
looked.

There was the purple and the red, and the
golden tower, the vision, the last word. She said
something — uttered some sound.

What had happened? I don't know. It all
looked contemptible. One seemed to see some-
thing beyond, something vaster — vaster than
cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods
to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower
reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond

181 . . -

CHAPTER ONE

it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unreal-
ised, an unrealisable infinity of space.

It was merely momentary. The tower filled its
place again and I looked at her.

" What the devil," I said, hysterically—" what
the devil do you play these tricks upon me
for? "

" You see," she answered, " the rudiments of
the sense are there."

" You must excuse me if I fail to understand,"
I said, grasping after fragments of dropped dig-
nity. " I am subject to fits of giddiness." I felt
a need for covering a species of nakedness. " Par-
don my swearing," I added; a proof of recovered
equanimity.

We resumed the road in silence. I was physi-
cally and mentally shaken ; and I tried to deceive
myself as to the cause. After some time I said :

" You insist then in preserving your — your in-
cognito."

" Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she an-
swered.

" You have told me that you come from the
Fourth Dimension," I remarked, ironically.
I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said,

19]

it

THE INHERITORS

patiently. She had the air of one in a position
of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to
brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlight-
ened person who has to explain, over and over
again, to stupid children some rudimentary point
of the multiplication table.

She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware
of their very wording. She even said " yes " at
the opening of her next speech.

" Yes," she said. " It is as if I were to try
to explain the new ideas of any age to a person
of the age that has gone before." She paused,
seeking a concrete illustration that would touch
me. "As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson
the methods and the ultimate vogue of the gock-
ney school of poetry."

" I understand," I said, " that you wish me to
consider myself as relatively a Choctaw. But
what I do not understand is; what bearing that
has upon — upon the Fourth Dimension, I think
you said? "

" I will explain," she replied.

" But you must explain as if you were explain-
ing to a Choctaw," I said, pleasantly, " you must
be concise and convincing."

[lO]

CHAPTER ONE

She answered: " I will."

She made a long speech of it; I condense. I
can't remember her exact words — there were so
many; but she spoke like a book. There was
something exquisitely piquant in her choice of
words, in her expressionless voice. I seemed to
be listening to a phonograph reciting a technical
work. There was a touch of the incongruous,
of the mad, that appealed to me — the common-
place rolling-down landscape, the straight, white,
undulating road that, from the tops of rises,
one saw running for miles and miles, straight,
straight, and so white. Filtering down through
the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of
innumerable skylarks. And I was listening to
a parody of a scientific work recited by a pho-
nograph.

I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension —
heard that it was an inhabited plane — invisible to
our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had
seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my
eyes. I heard the Dimensionists described: a
race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incred-
ible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse ; with
no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free

[II]

THE INHERITORS

from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weak-
ness, suffering and death, as if they had been
invulnerable and immortal. She did not say that
they were immortal, however. " You would —
you will — ^hate us," she concluded. And I seemed
only then to come to myself. The power of her
imagination was so great that I fancied myself
face to face with the truth. I supposed she had
been amusing herself; that she should have tried
to frighten me was inadmissible. I don't pretend
that I was completely at my ease, but I said, ami-
ably: " You certainly have succeeded in making
these beings hateful."

" I have made nothing," she said with a faint
smile, and went on amusing herself. She would
explain origins, now.

" Your " — she used the word as signifying, I
suppose, the inhabitants of the country, or the
populations of the earth — " your ancestors were
mine, but long ago you were crowded out of the
Dimension as we are to-day, you overran the
earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you con-
tracted diseases, as we shall contract them, —
beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of pity ... of
love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your

[12]

CHAPTER ONE

ideals, and sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with
creeds, with arts — ^you have forgotten ! "

She spoke with calm conviction; with an over*
whelming and dispassionate assurance. She was
stating facts; not professing a faith. We ap*
proached a little roadside inn. On a bench be-
fore the door a dun-clad country fellow was
asleep, his head on the table.

" Put your fingers in your ears," my compan-
ion commanded.

I htunoured her.

I saw her lips move. The countryman started,
shuddered, and by a clumsy, convulsive motion
of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his eyes.
Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed

on.

I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a
stallion,*' I commented. " I know there are
words that have certain effects. But you
shouldn't play pranks like the low-comedy devil
in Faustus."

" It isn't good form, I suppose? " she
sneered.

" It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, " the
poor fellow has lost his beer."

[13]

THE INHERITORS

" What's that to me? " she commented, with
the air of one affording a concrete illustration.

" It's a good deal to him," I answered.

" But what to me? '*

I said nothing. She ceased her exposition im-
mediately afterward, growing silent as suddenly
as she had become discoursive. It was rather as
if she had learnt a speech by heart and had come
to the end of it. I was quite at a loss as to what
she was driving at. There was a newness, a
strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me
as mad, sometimes as frightfully sane. We had a
meal somewhere — sl meal that broke the current
of her speech — and then, in the late afternoon,
took a by-road and wandered in secluded valleys.
I had been ill ; trouble of the nerves, brooding, the
monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I
had an errand in this part of the world and had
been approaching it deviously, seeking the nor-
mal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to
my old self. I did not wish to think of how I
should get through the year — of the thousand lit-
tle things that matter. So I talked and she — she
listened very well.

But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last,

[I4l

CHAPTER ONE

I myself brought the talk round to the Fourth
Dimension. We were sauntering along the for-
gotten valley that lies between Hardves and Stel-
ling Minnis; we had been silent for several min-
utes. For me, at least, the silence was pregnant
with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run
in currents between man and woman. The sun
was getting low and it was shadowy in those
shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought,
I forget what, and then began to badger her with
questions. I tried to exhaust the possibilities of
the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque sugges-
tions. I said : " And when a great many of you
have been crowded out of the Dimension and
invaded the earth you will do so and so — "
something preposterous and ironical. She coldly
dissented, and at once the irony appeared as
gross as the jocularity of a commercial traveller.
Sometimes she signified: " Yes, that is- what we
shall do; *^ signified it without speaking — by some
gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was
something impressive — something almost regal
— in this manner of hers; it was rather frighten-
ing in those lonely places, which were so forgot-
ten, so gray, so closed in. There was something of

[151

'

THE INHERITORS

the past world about the hanging woods, the little
veils of unmoving mist — ^as if time did not exist
in those furrows of the great world; and one was
so absolutely alone; anything might have hap-
pened. I grew weary of the sotmd of my tongue.
But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on
me the effect of some incredible stimulant.

We came to the end of the valley where the
road begins to climb the southern hill, out into
the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy
silence. From her grimly dispassionate reitera-
tions I had attained to a clear idea, even to a
visualisation, of her fantastic conception — ^allc-
^ory, madness, or whatever it was. She certainly
forced it home. The Dimensionists were to come
in swarms, to materialise, to devour like locusts,
to be all the more irresistible because indistin-
guishable. They were to come like snow in the
night: in the morning one would look out and
find the world white; they were to come as the
gray hairs come, to sap the strength of us as the
years sap the strength of the muscles. As to
methods, we should be treated as we ourselves
treat the inferior races. There would be no fight-
ing, no killing; we--our whole social system—

(i6]

CHAPTER ONE

would break as a beam snaps, because we were
worm-eaten with altruism and ethics. We, at our
worst, had a certain limit, a certain stage where
we exclaimed: " No, this is playing it too low
down," because we had scruples that acted like
handicapping weights. She uttered, I think, only
two sentences of connected words: "We shall
race with you and we shall not be weighted," and,
** We shall merely sink you lower by our weight."
All the rest went like this :

" But then," I would say • . . " we shall
not be able to trust anyone. Anyone may be one
of you. . . ." She would answer: " Anyone."
She prophesied a reign of terror for us. As one
passed one's neighbour in the street one would
cast sudden, piercing glances at him.

I was silent. The birds were singing the sun
down. It was very dark among the branches,
and from minute to minute the colours of the
world deepened and grew sombre.

" But " I said. A feeling of unrest was

creeping over me. " But why do you tell me all
this? " I asked. " Do you think I will enlist with
you? "

*' You will have to in the end," she said, " and I

[171

THE INHERITORS

ever meet again? " My voice came huskily, as if
I had not spoken for years and years.

" Oh, very often," she answered.

"Very often?" I repeated. I hardly knew
whether I was pleased or dismayed. Through the
gate-gap in a hedge, I caught a glimmer of a
white house front. It seemed to belong to an-
other world; to another order of things.

"Ah . . . here is Callan V' I said. "This
is where I was going. . . ."

" I know," she answered; " we part here."

" To meet again? " I asked.

" Oh ... to meet again; why, yes, to meet
again."

[aol

CHAPTER TWO

HER figure faded into the darkness, as
pale things waver down into deep water,
and as soon as she disappeared my sense
of humour returned. The episode appeared more
clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but de-
cidedly charming, chance travelling companion.
The girl was a riddle, and a riddle once guessed
is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a very
trivial thing when I had found a solution. It oc-
curred to me that she wished me to regard her
as a symbol, perhaps, of the future — ^as a type
of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact.
She had been playing the fool with me, in her
insolent modernity. She had wished me to un-
derstand that I was old-fashioned ; that the frame
of mind of which I and my fellows were the in-
heritors was over and done with. We were to
be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superan-
nuated. It was obvious that she was better
equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a

[21]

THE INHERITORS

something — ^not only quickness of wit, not only
ruthless determination, but a something quite
different and quite indefinably more impressive.
Perhaps it was only the confidence of the super-
seder, the essential quality that makes for the
empire of the Occidental. But I was not a negro
— not even relatively a Hindoo. I was some-
body, confound it, I was somebody.

As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuc-
cessful, so absolutely unrecognised, that I had got
into the way of regarding myself as ahead of my
time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of
mind — the only revenge that I could take upon
despiteful Fate. This girl came to confound me
with the common herd — she declared herself to
be that very posterity for which I worked.

She was probably a member of some clique that
called themselves Fourth Dimensionists — just
as there had been pre-Raphaelites. It was a mat-
ter of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it
was that I had never heard of them. And how on
earth had they come to hear of me!

" She must have read something of mine," I
found myself musing: " the Jenkins story per-
haps. Itmust have been the Jenkins story; they

[22]

CHAPTER TWO

gave it a good place in their rotten magazine.
She must have seen that it was the real thing,
and. . . ." When one is an author one looks
at things in that way, you know.

By that time I was ready to knock at the door
of the great Callan. I seemed to be jerked into
the commonplace medium of a great, great — oh,
an infinitely great — novelist's home life. I was
led into a well-lit drawing-room, welcomed by the
great man's wife, gently propelled into a bed-
room, made myself tidy, descended and was in-
troduced into the sanctum, before my eyes had
grown accustomed to the lamp-light. Callan
was seated upon his sofa surrounded by an ad-
miring crowd of very local personages. I forget
what they looked like. I think there was a man
whose reddish beard did not become him and an-
other whose face might have been improved by
the addition of a reddish beard ; there was also an
extremely moody dark man and I vaguely recol-
lect a person who lisped.

They did not talk much ; indeed there was very
little conversation. What there was Callan sup-
plied. He — spoke — ^very — slowly — ^and — ^very^ —
authoritatively, like a great actor whose aim is

[231

THE INHERITORS

to hold the stage as long as possible. The rais-
ing of his heavy eyelids at the opening door con-
veyed the impression of a dark, mental weariness;
and seemed somehow to give additional length
to his white nose. His short, brown beard was
getting very grey, I thought. With his lofty fore-
head and with his superior, yet propitiatory smile,
I was of course familiar. Indeed one saw them
on posters in the street. The notables did not
want to talk. They wanted to be spell-bound
—and they were. Callan sat there in an ap-
propriate attitude — the one in which he was
always photographed. One hand supported his
head, the other toyed with his watch-chain. His
face was uniformly solemn, but his eyes were dis-
concertingly furtive. He cross-questioned me as
to my walk from Canterbury; remarked that the
cathedral was a — magnificent — Gothic — Monu-
ment and set me right as to the lie of the roads.
He seemed pleased to find that I remembered
very little of what I ought to have noticed on
the way. It gave him an opportunity for the dis-
play of his local erudition.

" A — remarkable woman — used — to — ^live — ^in
— the — cottage — ^next — the — mill — at — Stel-

[24l

CHAPTER TWO

ling," he said; "she was the original of Kate
Wingfield."

" In your ' Boldero? ' " the chorus chorussed.

Remembrance of the common at Stelling — of
the glimmering white faces of the shadowy cot-
tages — was like a cold waft of mist to me. I for-
got to say " Indeed! "

" She was — ^a very — ^remarkable — woman —
She "

I found myself wondering which was real ; the
common with its misty-hedges and the blurred
moon; or this room with its ranks of uniformly
bound books and its bust of the great man that
threw a portentous shadow upward from its
pedestal behind the lamp.

Before I had entirely recovered myself, the
notables were departing to catch the last train.
I was left alone with Callan.

He did not trouble to resume his attitude for
me, and when he did speak, spoke faster.

" Interesting man, Mr. Jinks? " he said; " you
recognised him? "

"No,*' I said; "I don't think I ever met
him."

Callan looked annoyed.

THE INHERITORS

"I thought I'd got him pretty well. He's
Hector Steele. In ray ' Blanfield/ " he added.

" Indeed! " I said. I had never been able to
read " Blanfield." " Indeed, ah, yes-— of course."

There was an awkward pause.

"The whiskey will be here in a minute/' he
said, suddenly. " I don't have it in when What-
not's here. He's the Rector, you know; a great
temperance man. When we've had a — ^a modest
quencher — ^we'U get to business."

" Oh," I said, " your letters really meant ^"

" Of course," he answered. " Oh, here's the
whiskey. Well now, Fox was down here the
other night. You know Fox, of course? "

" Didn't he start the rag called ? "

" Yes, yes," Callan answered, hastily, " he's
been very successful in launching papers. Now
he's trying his hand with a new one. He's any
amount of backers — ^big names, you know. He's
to run my next as a feuUleton. This — this vent-
ure is to be rather more serious in tone than
any that he's done hitherto. You understand?"

"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see where
I come in."

Callan took a meditative sip of whiskey, added

[26]

CHAPTER TWO

a little more water, a little more whiskey, and
then found the mixture to his liking.

" You see/' he said, " Fox got a letter here to
say that Wilkinson had died suddenly — some af-
fection of the heart. Wilkinson was to have writ-
ten a series of personal articles on prominent
people. Well, Fox was nonplussed and I put in
a word for you."

" I*m sure Fm much — " I began.

" Not at all, not at all," Callan interrupted,
blandly. "I've known you and you've known me
for 9 number of years."

A sudden picture danced before my eyes — the
portrait of the Callan of the old days — the fawn-
ing, shady individual, with the seedy clothes, the
furtive eyes and the obliging manners.

" Why, yes," I said; " but I don't see that that
gives me any claim."

Callan cleared his throat.

" The lapse of time," he said in his grand man-
ner, '* rivets what we may call the bands of asso-
ciation."

He paused to inscribe this sentence on the tab-
lets of his memory. It would be dragged in —
to form a purple patch — ^in his new serial.

127]

THE INHERITORS

" You see," he went on, " I've written a good
deal of autobiographical matter and it would
verge upon self-advertisement to do more. You
know how much I dislike that. So I showed Fox
your sketch in the Kensington,**

" The Jenkins story? " I said. " How did you
come to see it?"

" Then send me the Kensington/* he answered.
There was a touch of sourness in his tone, and I
remembered that the Kensington I had seen had
been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Cal-
lan himself — seven unreadable packed pages of
a serial.

" As I was saying," Callan began again, " you
ought to know me very well, and I suppose you
are acquainted with my books. As for the rest,
I will give you what material you want."

" But, my dear Callan," I said, " I've never
tried my hand at that sort of thing."

Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.

" It struck both Fox and myself that your —
your ' Jenkins ' was just what was wanted," he
said ; " of course, that was a study of a kind
of broken-down painter. But it was well
done."

[28]

CHAPTER TWO

I bowed my head. Praise from Callan was best
acknowledged in silence.

" You see, what we want, or rather what Fox
wants/' he explained, "is a kind of series of
studies of celebrities chez eux. Of course, they
are not broken down. But if you can treat them
as you treated Jenkins — get them in their studies,
surrounded by what in their case stands for the
broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains —
it will be exactly the thing. It will be a new line,
or rather — what is a great deal better, mind you
— ^an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly
diflfcrent way. That's what the public wants."

"Ah, yes," I said, "that's what the public
wants. But all the same, it's been done time out
of mind before. Why, I've seen photographs of
you and your armchair and your pen-wiper and
so on, half a score of times in the sixpenny maga-

zines."

Callan again indicated bland superiority with a
wave of his hand.

" You undervalue yourself," he said.

I murmured — " Thanks."

" This is to be — not a mere pandering to curi-
osity — ^but an attempt to get at the inside of

[29]

THE INHERITORS

things — to get the atmosphere, so to speak; not
merely to catalogue furniture/'

He was quoting from the prospectus of the
new paper, and then cleared his throat for the
utterance of a tremendous truth.

" Photography — ^is not — ^Axt," he remarked.

The fantastic side of our colloquy began to
strike me.

"After all," I thought to myself, "why
shouldn't that girl have played at being a denizen
of another sphere? She did it ever so much bet-
ter than Callan. She did it too well, I suppose."

" The price is very decent," Callan chimed in.
" I don't know how much per thousand, . . .
but ..."

I found myself reckoning, against my will as it
were.

" You'll do it, I suppose? " he said.

I thought of my debts. ..." Why, yes,
I suppose so," I answered. " But who are the
others that I am to provide with atmospheres? "

Callan shrugged his shoulders.

" Oh, all sorts of prominent people — ^soldiers,
statesmen, Mr. Churchill, the Foreign Minister,
artists, preachers — all sorts of people."

[30]

CHAPTER TWO

" All sorts of glory," occurred to me.

" The paper will stand expenses up to a reason-
able figfure," Callan reassured me.

" It'll be a good joke for a time," I said. " I'm
infinitely obliged to you."

He warded off my thanks with both hands.

" I'll just send a wire to Fox to say that you
accept," he said, rising. He seated himself at
his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an
appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his
life. These he had struck before so many peo-
ple that even in the small hours of the morning he
was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him
he had every form of labour-saver; every kind
of literary knick-knack. There were book-holders
that swung into positions suitable to appropriate
attitudes; there were piles of little green boxes
with red capital letters of the alphabet upon them,
and big red boxes with black small letters. There
was a writing-lamp that cast an aesthetic glow
upon another appropriate attitude — and there
was one typewriter with note-paper upon it, and
another with MS. paper already in position.

" My God! " I thought—" to these heights the
Muse soars."

131]

THE INHERITORS

As I looked at the gleaming pillars of the
typewriters, the image of my own desk appeared
to me; chipped, ink-stained, gloriously dusty. I
thought that when again I lit my battered old
tin lamp I should see ashes and match-ends; a
tobacco-jar, an old gnawed penny penholder, bits
of pink blotting-paper, match-boxes, old letters,
and dust everywhere. And I knew that my atti-
tude — when I sat at it — ^would be inappropriate.

Callan was ticking oS the telegram upon his
machine. "It will go in the iporning at eight,"
he said.

[32]

CHAPTER THREE

TO encourage me, I suppose, Callan gave
me the proof-sheets of his next to read
in bed. The thing was so bad that it
nearly sickened me of him and his jobs, I tried
to read the stuff; to read it conscientiously, to
read myself to sleep with it. I was under obli-
gations to old Cal and I wanted to do him justice,
but the thing was impossible. I fathomed a sort
of a plot. It dealt in fratricide with a touch of
adultery; a Great Moral Purpose loomed in the
background. It would have been a dully readable
novel but for that; as it was, it was intolerable.
It was amazing that Cal himself could put out
such stuff; that he should have the impudence.
He was not a fool, not by any means a fool. It
revolted me more than a little,

I came to it out of a different plane of thought.
I may not have been able to write then— or I
may; but I did know enough to recognise the
flagrantly, the indecently bad, and, upon my soul,
the idea that I, too, must cynically offer this sort

[33]

THE INHERITORS

of stuff if I was ever to sell my tens of thousands
very nearly sent me back to my solitude. Callan
had begun very much as I was beginning now;
he had even, I believe, had ideals in his youth
and had starved a little. It was rather trying to
think that perhaps I was really no more than
another Callan, that, when at last I came to re-
view my life, I should have much such a record
to look back upon. It disgusted me a little, and
when I put out the light the horrors settled down
upon me.

I woke in a shivering frame of mind, ashamed
to meet Callan's eye. It was as if he must
be aware of my over-night thoughts, as if he
must think me a fool who quarrelled with my
victuals. He gave no signs of any such knowl-
edge — was dignified, cordial; discussed his
breakfast with gusto, opened his letters, and so
on. An anaemic amanuensis was taking notes for
appropriate replies. How could I tell him that
I would not do the work, that I was too proud
and all the rest of it? He would have thought
me a fool, would have stiffened into hostility, I
should have lost my last chance. And, in the
broad light of day, I was loath to do that.

[34]

CHAPTER THREE

He began to talk about indifferent things; we
glided out on to a current of mediocre conver-
sation. The psychical moment, if there were any
such, disappeared.

Someone bearing my name had written to ex-
press an intention of offering personal worship
that afternoon. The prospect seemed to please the
great Cal. He was used to such things; he found
them pay, I suppose. We began desultorily to
discuss the possibility of the writer's being a rela-
tion of mine; I doubted. I had no relations that
I knew of; there was a phenomenal old aunt who
had inherited the acres and respectability of ^he
Etchingham Grangers, but she was not the kind
of person to worship a novelist. I, the poor last
of the family, was without the pale, simply be-
cause I, too, was a novelist. I explained these
things to Callan and he commented on them,
found it strange how small or how large, I forget
which, the world was. Since his own apotheosis
shoals of Callans had claimed relationship.

I ate my breakfast. Afterward, we set about
the hatching of that article — ^the thought of it
sickens me even now. You will find it in the
volume along with the others; you may see how

[35]

THE INHERITORS

I lugged in Callan's surroundings, his writing-
room, his dining-room, the romantic arbour in
which he found it easy to write love-scenes, the
clipped treps like peacocks and the trees clipped
like bears, and all the rest of the background for
appropriate attitudes. He was satisfied with any
arrangements of words that suggested a gentle
awe on the part of the writer.

" Yes,^es," he said once or twice, " that's just
the touch, just the touch — ^very nice. But don't
you think. . . ." We lunched after some time.

I was so happy. Quite pathetically happy.
It had come so easy to me. I had doubted my
ability to do the sort of thing; but it had writ-
ten itself, as money spends itself, and I was going
to earn money like that. The whole of my past
seemed a n^take — ^a childishness. I had kept
out of this sort of thing because I had thought it
below me; I had kept out of it and had starved
my body and warped my mind. Perhaps I had
even damaged my work by this isolation. To un-
derstand life one must live — and I had only
brooded. But, by Jove, I would try to live now.

Callan had retired for his accustomed siesta
and I was smoking pipe after pipe over a con-*

[361

CHAPTER THREE

foundedly bad French novel that I had found in
the book-shelves. I must have been dozing. A
voice from behind my back announced:

" Miss Etchingham Granger! " and added —
" Mr. Callan will be down directly." I laid down
my pipe, wondered whether I ought to have been
smoking when Cal expected visitors, and rose to
my feet.

" You ! " I said, sharply. She answered, " You
see." She was smiling. She had been so much
in my thoughts that I was hardly surprised — the
thing had even an air of pleasant inevitability
about it.

" You must be a cousin of mine," I said, " the
name — — "

'* Oh, call it sister," she answered.

I was feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance
would throw it in my way. You see^ was going
to live at last, and life for me meant irrespon-
sibility.

" Ah ! " I said, ironically, " you are going to be
a sister to me, as they say." She might have
come the bogy over me last night in the moon-
light, but now . . . There was a spice of dan-
ger about it, too, just a touch lurking some-

[371

THE INHERITORS

where. Besides, she was good-looking and well
set up, and I couldn't see what could touch me.
Even if it did, even if I got into a mess, I had
no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried
about me. I stood quite alone, and I half relished
the idea of getting into a mess — it would be part
of life, too. I was going to have a little money,
and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling
to know what she was really at.

** And one might ask," I said, " what you are
doing in this — ^in this. ..." I was at a loss for
a word to describe the room— the smugness
parading as professional Bohemianism.

" Oh, I am about my own business," she
said, " I told you last night — ^have you for-
gotten? "

" Last night you were to inherit the earth," I
reminded her, " and one doesn't start in a place
like this. Now I should have gone — ^well — I
should have gone to some politician's house — ^a
cabinet minister's — say to Gurnard's. He's the
coming man, isn't he? "

" Why, yes," she answered, " he's the coming
man."

You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard

[38]

CHAPTER THREE

was only the dark horse of the ministry. I knew
little enough of these things, despised politics
generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gur-
nard I disliked platonically; perhaps because his
face was a little enigmatic — a little repulsive.
The country, then, was in the position of having
no Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct
strains in it — the Churchill and the Gurnard —
and Gurnard was the dark horse.

" Oh, you should join your fiats," I said, pleas-
antly. " If he's the coming man, where do you
come in? . . . Unless he, too, is a Dimension-
ist.''

" Oh, both — ^both,*' she answered. I admired
the tranquillity with which she converted my
points into her own. And I was very happy — ^it
struck me as a pleasant sort of fooling. . . .

" I suppose you will let me know some day
who you are? " I said.

" I have told you several times," she answered.

" Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I as-
serted, ** not here, you know, and anyhow, why
should you want to? "

" I have told you," she said again,

" You've told me you were my sister," I said;

[39]

THE INHERITORS

" but my sister died years and years ago. Still,
if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's sis-
ter . . ."

" It suits me," she answered — " I want to be
placed, you see."

I knew that my name was good enough to
place anyone. We had been the Grangers of
Etchingham since — oh, since the flood. And if
the girl wanted to be my sister and a Granger,
why the devil shouldn't she, so long as she would
let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked
to a woman — not to a well set-up one — ^for ages
and ages. It was as if I had come back from
one of the places to which younger sons exile
themselves, and for all I knew it might be the
correct thing for girls to elect brothers nowadays
in one set or another.

" Oh, tell me some more,'* I said, " one likes
to know about one's sister. You and the Right
Honourable Charles Gurnard are Dimensionists,
and who are the others of your set? "

"There is only one," she answered. And
would you believe it! — ^it seems he was Fox, the
editor of my new paper.

" You select your characters with charming in-

[40]

I

CHAPTER THREE

discriminateness," I said. " Fox is only a sort
of toad, you know — he won't get far."

" Oh, he'll go far," she answered, " but he
won't get there. Fox is fighting against us."

" Oh, so you don't dwell in amity? " I said,
" You fight for your own hands."

" We fight for our own hands," she answered,
" I shall throw Gurnard over when he's pulled
the chestnuts out of the fire."

I was beginning to get a little tired of this.
You see, for me, the scene was a veiled flirtation
and I wanted to get on. But I had to listen to
her fantastic scheme of things. It was really a
duel between Fox, the Journal-founder, and Gur-
nard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Fox,
with Churchill, the Foreign Minister, and his sup-
porters, for pieces, played what he called " the
Old Morality business " against Gurnard, who
passed for a cynically immoral politician.

I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out

of this stage into something more personal. I

thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep

me from getting at her errand at Callan's. But

I didn't want to know her errand; I wanted to

make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and

[41]

THE INHERITORS

Churchill, the Foreign Minister, who really was
a sympathetic character and did stand for po-*
litical probity, she might be uttering allegorical
truths, but I was not interested in them. I
wanted to start some topic that would lead aWay
from this Dimensionist farce.

** My dear sister," I began. . . . Callan al-
ways moved about like a confounded eavesdrop-
per, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the
comers of screens. I expect he got copy like
th^t.

" So, she's your sister? " he said suddenly, from
behind me. " Strange that you shouldn't recog-
nise the handwriting. . . ."

" Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heart-
edly, " we are so different." I wanted to take a
rise out of the creeping animal that he was. He
confronted her blandly.

" You must be the little girl that I remember,"
he said. He had known my parents ages ago.
That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I
wouldn't have chosen him for a friend. " I
thought Granger said you were dead . • . but
one gets confused. . . ."

" Oh, we see very little of each other," she an-

CHAPTER THREE

swered. " Arthur might have said I was dead —
he's capable of anything, you know." She spoke
with an assumption of sisterly indifference that
was absolutely striking. I began to think she
must be an actress of genius, she did it so well
She was the sister who had remained within the
pale ; I, the rapscallion of a brother whose vaga-
ries were trying to his relations. That was the
note she struck, and she maintained it. I didn't
know what the deuce she was driving at, and X
didn't care. These scenes with a touch of mad-
ness appealed to me. I was going to live, and
here, apparently, was a woman ready to my hand.
Besides, she was making a fool of Callan, and that
pleased me. His patronising manners had irri-
tated me.

I assisted rather silently. They began to talk
of mutual acquaintances — ^as one talks. They
both seemed to know everyone in this world.
She gave herself the airs of being quite in the
inner ring ; alleged familiarity with quite impos-
sible person^, with my portentous aunt, with
Cabinet Ministers — ^that sort of people. They
talked about them — she, as if she lived among
them; he, as if he tried very hard to live up to
them.

[43]

THE INHERITORS

She affected reverence for his person, plied him
with compliments that he swallowed raw — ^hor-
ribly raw. It made me shudder a little; it was
tragic to see the little great man confronted with
that woman. It shocked me to think that, really,
I must appear much like him — must have looked
like that yesterday. He was a little uneasy, I
thought, made little confidences as if in spite of
himself; little confidences about the Hour, the
new paper for which I was engaged. It seemed
to be run by a small gang with quite a number
of assorted axes to grind. There was some for-
eign financier — sl person of position whom she
knew (a noble man in the best sense, Callan said) ;
there was some politician (she knew him too, and
he was equally excellent, so Callan said), Mr.
Churchill himself, an artist or so, an actor or so
— and Callan. They all wanted a little backing,
so it seemed. Callan, of course, put it in another
way. The Great — Moral — Purpose turned up, I
don't know why. He could not think he was
taking me in and she obviously knew more about
the people concerned than he did. But there it
was, looming large, and quite as farcical as all the
rest of it. The foreign financier — ^they called him

[44]

CHAPTER THREE

the Due de Mersch — was by way of being a
philanthropist on megalomaniac lines. For some
international reason he had been allowed to pos-
sess himself of the pleasant land of Greenland.
There wa3 gold in it and train-oil in it and other
things that paid — ^but the Due de Mersch was
not thinking of that. He was first and foremost
a State Founder, or at least he was that after be-
ing titular ruler of some little spot of a Teutonic
grand-duchy. No one of the great powers would
let any other of the great powers possess the
country, so it had been handed over to the Due
de Mersch, who had at heart, said Cal, the glori-
ous vision of founding a model state — the model
state, in which washed and broadclothed Esqui-
maux would live, side by side, regenerated lives,
enfranchised equals of choicely selected younger
sons of whatever occidental race. It was that sort
of thing. I was even a little overpowered, in
spite of the fact that Callan was its trumpeter;
there was something fine about the conception
and Churchiirs acquiescence seemed to guarantee
an honesty in its execution.

The Due de Mersch wanted money, and he
V^anted to run a railway across Greenland. His

l45j

THE INHERITORS

idea was that the British public should supply the
money and the British Government back the rail-
way^ as they did in the case of a less philanthropic
Suez Canal. In return he offered an eligible har-
bour and a strip of coast at one end of the line;
the British public was to be repaid in casks of
train-oil and gold and with the consciousness of
having aided in letting the light in upon a dark
spot of the earth. So the Due de Mersch started
the Hour. The Hour was to extol the Due
dc Mersch's moral purpose; to pat the Gov-
ernment's back; influence public opinion; and
generally advance the cause of the System for the
Regeneration of the Arctic Regions.

I tell the story rather flippantly, because I
heard it from Callan, and because it was impos-
sible to take him seriously. Besides, I was not
very much interested in the thing itself. But it
did interest me to see how deftly she pumped
him — squeezed him dry.

I was even a little alarmed for poor old Cal.
After all, the man had done me a service; had
got me a job. As for her, she struck me as a
potentially dangerous person. One couldn't tell,
she might be some adventuress, or if not that, a

[46]

CHAPTER THREE

speculator who would damage Cal's little
schemes. I put it to her plainly afterward; and
quarreUed with her as well as I could. I drove her
down to the station. Callan must have been dis-
tinctly impressed or he would never have had out
his trap for her.

** You know/' I said to her, " I won't have you
play tricks with Callan — ^not while you're using
my name. It's very much at your service as far
as I'm concerned — ^but, confound it, if you're
going to injure him I shall have to show you up
—to tell him."

" You couldn't, you know," she said, perfectly
calmly, "you've let yourself in for it. He
wouldn't feel pleased with you for letting it go
as far as it has. You'd lose your job, and you're
going to live, you know — ^you're going to
live. . . ."

I was taken aback by this veiled threat in the
midst of the pleasantry. It wasn't fair play — ^not
at all fair play. I recovered some of my old alarm,
remembered that she really was a dangerous per-
son; that . . .

But I sha'n't hurt Callan," she said, suddenly,

you may make your mind easy."

[471

if

THE INHERITORS

" You really won't? " I asked.

" Really not/' she answered. It relieved me to
believe her. I did not want to quarrel with her.
You see, she fascinated me, she seemed to act as
a stimulant, to set me tingling somehow — ^and
to baffle me. . . . And there was truth in
what she said. I had let myself in for it, and I
didn't want to lose Callan's job by telling him
I had made a fool of him.

" I don't care about anything else," I said.
She smiled.

1481

CHAPTER FOUR

1WENT up to town bearing the Callan ar-
ticle, and a letter of warm commendation from
Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had
accepted emendations; had lavished praise, had
been unctuous and yet had contrived to retain
the dignified savour of the editorial "we." Cal-
lan himself asked no more.

I was directed to seek Fox out — ^to find him
immediately. The matter was growing urgent.
Fox was not at the office — the brand new office
that I afterward saw pass through the succeed-
ing stages of business-like comfort and dusty
neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the
stage door of the Buckingham.

I waited in the doorkeeper's glass box at the
Buckingham. I was eyed by the suspicious com*
missionaire with the contempt reserved for rest-
ing actors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants
as a rule. Call-boys sought Mr. Fox. " Anybody
seen Mr. Fox? He's gone to lunch."

[49]

THE INHERITORS

"Mr. Fox is out," said the commissionaire.

I explained that the matter was urgent. More
call-boys disappeared through the folding doors.
Unenticing personages passed the glass box,
casting hostile glances askance at me on my high
stool. A message came back.

" If it's Mr. Etchingham Granger, he's to fol-
low Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's at once.*'

I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly's — to a
little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not
specify. The eminent journalist was lunching
with the eminent actress. A husband was in at-
tendance --*- a nonentity with a heavy yellow
moustache, who hummed and hawed over his
watch.

Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, per-
emptory manner. Mrs. Hartly was— well, she
was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we
all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and
her voice, and the way she used her hands. She
broke her bread with those very hands; spoke
to her husband with that very voice, and rose
from table with that same graceful manage-
ment of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me;
at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who

[50]

CHAPTER FOUR

handed the asparagus — ^great round grey eyes.
She was just the same. The curtain never fell on
that eternal dress rehearsal. I don't wonder the
husband was forever looking at his watch.

Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dis-
pensed with ceremony, read my manuscript over
his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the
savour.

" You are going to do me for Mr. Fox," Mrs.
Hartly said, turning her large grey eyes upon
me. They were very soft. They seemed to send
out waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought
of those others that had shot out a razor-edged
ray.

" Why," I answered, " there was some talk of
my dbing somebody for the Hour^

Fox put my manuscript imder his empty
tumbler.

" Yes," he said, sharply. " He will do, I think.
H'm, yes. Why, yes."

" You're a friend of Mr. Callan's, aren't you? "
Mrs. Hartly asked, " What a dear, nice man he
is! You should see him at rehearsals. You
know I'm doing his 'Boldero ' ; he's given me &
perfectly lovely part — ^perfectly lovely. And the

[51]

THE INHERITORS

trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the
stage."

"H'm; yes," Fox interjected, "he likes to
have his own way."

" We all like that," the great actress said. She
was quoting from her first great part. I thought
—but, perhaps, I was mistaken — ^that all her ut-
terances were quotations from her first great part.
Her husband looked at his watch.

" Are you coming to this confounded flower
show? " he asked.

" Yes," she said, turning her mysterious eyes
upon him, " I'll go and get ready."

She disappeared through an inner door. I ex-
pected to hear the pistol-shot and the heavy fall
from the next room. I forgot that it was not the
end of the fifth act.

Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.

" Come along, Granger," he said to me, " I
want to speak to you. You'll have plenty of
opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect.
She's tenth on your list. Good-day, Hartly."

Hartly's hand was wavering between his
moustache and his watch pocket.

" Good-day," he said sulkily.

[52]

CHAPTER FOUR

''You must come and see me again, Mn
Granger," Mrs, Hartly said from the door.
"Come to the Buckingham and see how we're
getting on with your friend's play. We must
have a good long talk if you're to get my local
colour, as Mr. Fox calls it."

*^ To gild refined gold ; to paint the lily.
To throw a perfume on the violet **

I quoted banally.

" That's it," she said, with a tender smile. She
was fastening a button in her glove. I doubt her
recognition of the quotation.
When we were in our hansom. Fox began :
" I'm relieved by what I've seen of your copy.
One didn't expect this sort of thing from you.
You think it a bit below you, don't you? Oh,
I know, I know. You literary people are usually
so impracticable; you know what I mean. Cal-
lan said you were the man. Callan has his uses;
but one has something else to do with one's
paper. I've got interests of my own. But you'll
do; it's all right. You don't mind my being
candid, do you, now? " I muttered that I rather
liked it.

I53l

THE INHERITORS

^' Well then/' he went on, " now I see my way."

" I'm glad you do," I murmured. " I wish I
did/'

" Oh, that will be all right," Fox comforted.
" I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of
the job; particularly if you ain't used to it. But
you won't find the others as trying. There's
Churchill now, he's your next. You'll have to
mind him. You'll find him a decent chap. Not
a bit of side on him."

" What Churchill? " I asked.

" The Foreign Minister."

'^The devil," I said.
Oh, you'll find him all right," Fox reassured;

you're to go down to his place to-morrow. It's
all arranged. Here we are. Hop out/' He
suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly
up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour's home.
He left me to pay the cabman.

When I rejoined him he was giving direc-
tions to an invisible somebody through folding
doors.

" Come along," he said, breathlessly. " Can't
see him," he added to a little boy, who held a card
in his hands. ''Tell him to go to Mr. Evans.

[54]

it

CHAPTER FOUR

One's life isn't one's own here," he went on,
ivhen he had reached his own room.

It was a palatial apartment furnished in white
and gold — Louis Quinze, or something of the
sort — with very new decorations after Watteau
covering the walls. The process of disfiguration,
however, had already begun. A roll desk of the
least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of
the tall windows ; the carpet was marked by muddy
footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run
across one end of the room.

" Hullo, Evans," Fox shouted across it, " just
see that man from Grant's, will you? Heard
from the Central News yet? "

He was looking through the papers on the
desk.

" Not yet, I've just rung them up for the fifth
time," the answer came.

" Keep on at it," Fox exhorted.

" Here's Churchill's letter," he said to me.
** Have an arm-chair; those blasted things are
too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourself
comfortable. I'll be back in a minute." .

I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to
the Foreign Minister's letter. It expressed bored

[55]

THE INHERITORS

tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it seemed
to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched
up a paper from his desk, and ran out again.

" Read Churchill's letter? " he asked, in pass-
ing. " ril tell you all about it in a minute." I
don't know what he expected me to do with
it— kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.

At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there
idle in the midst of the hurry, the breathlessness.
I seemed to be at last in contact with real life,
with the life that matters. I was somebody, too.
Fox treated me with a kind of deference — ^as if I
\vere a great unknown. His " you literary men ''
was pleasing. It was the homage that the pre-
tender pays to the legitimate prince; the recog-
nition due to the real thing from the machine-
made imitation; the homage of the builder to the
architect.

" Ah, yes," it seemed to say, " we jobbing men
run up our rows and rows of houses ; build whole
towns and fill the papers for years. But when
we want something special — ^something monu-
mental — we have to come to you."

Fox came in again.

" Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can't pos-

[56]

CHAPTER FOUR

sibly get a moment for a chat with you. Look
here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph
round the comer — to-night at six sharp. You'll
go to Churchill's to-morrow."

The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox,
was one of those sporadic establishments that
spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand.
It is one of their qualities that they are always
just round the corner; another, that their stew-
ards are too familiar; another, that they — ^in the
opinion of the other members — are run too much
for the convenience of one in particular.

In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner
waiting. I sat in the little smoking-room and,
from behind a belated morning paper, listened to
the conversation of the three or four journalists
who represented the members. I felt as a new
boy in a new school feels on his first introduction
to his fellows.

There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in
an arm-chair before the fire. At dinner-time he
woke up, remarked :

" You should have seen Fanny EUsler," and
went to sleep again.

Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a beau

[571

THE INHERITORS

jcune homme, with the necktie of a Parisian-
American student. On a chair beside him sat a
personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful
lack of h's, I took for a distinguished foreigner.

They were talking about a splendid subject for
a music-hall dramatic sketch of some sort — ^af-
forded by a bus driver, I fancy.

I heard afterward that my Frenchman had
been a costermonger and was now half journalist,
half financier, and that my art student was an
employee of one of the older magazines.

" Dinner's on the table, gents,'' the steward
said from the door. He went toward the sleeper
by the fire. " I expect Mr. Cunningham will
wear that arm-chair out before he's done," he said
over his shoulder.

" Poor old chap ; he's got nowhere else to go
to," the magazine employee said.

" Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the
journalist financier retorted. " Make a good
sketch that, eh? " he continued, reverting to his
bus-driver.

" Jolly ! " the magazine employee said, indiffer-
ently.

Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward

lS8]

tt

CHAPTER FOUR

said, touching the sleeper on the shoulder, " din-
ner's on the table/'

" God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said,
with a start. The steward left the room. The
dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth
out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a
bandanna handkerchief, and inserted them in his
mouth.

He tottered out of the room.

I got up and began to inspect the pen-and-ink
sketches on the walls.

The faded paltry caricatures of faded paltry
lesser lights that confronted me from fly-blown
frames on the purple walls almost made me
shiver.

" There you are. Granger," said a cheerful voice
behind me. " Come and have some dinner."

I went and had some dinner. It was seasoned
by small jokes and little personalities. A Teu-
tonic journalist, a musical critic, I suppose, in-
quired as to the origin of the meagre pheasant.
Fox replied that it had been preserved in the
back-yard. The dramatic critic mumbled un-
heard that some piece or other was off the bills
of the Adelphi. I grinned vacantly. After-

[59]

THE INHERITORS

ward, under his breath. Fox put me up to a
thing or two regarding the inner meaning of the
new daily. Put by him, without any glamour of
a moral purpose, the case seemed rather mean.
The dingy smoking-room depressed me and the
whole thing was, what I had, for so many years,
striven to keep out of. Fpx hung over my ear,
whispering. There were shades of intonation in
his sibillating. Some of those " in it," the voice
implied, were not above-board; others were, and
the tone became deferential, implied that I was to
take my tone from itself.

" Of course, a man like the Right Honourable
C. does it on the straight, . . . quite on the
straight, . . . has to have some sort of semi-
ofKcial backer. ... In this case, it's me,
. . . the Hour. They're a bit spHtty, the
Ministry, I mean. . . . They say Gurnard isn't
playing square . . . they say so." His
broad, red face glowed as he bent down to my ear,
his little sea-blue eyes twinkled with moisture.
He enlightened me cautiously, circumspectly.
There was something unpleasant in the business
— not exactly in Fox himself, but the kind of
thing. I wish he would cease his explanations — I

[6ol

CHAPTER FOUR

didn't want to hear them. I have never wanted
to know how things are worked; preferring to
take the world at its face value. Callan's revela-
tions had been bearable, because of the farcical
pompousness of his manner. But this was differ-
ent, it had the stamp of truth, perhaps because it
was a little dirty. I didn't want to hear that the
Foreign Minister was ever so remotely mixed up
in this business. He was only a symbol to me,
but he stood for the stability of statesmanship and
for the decencies that it is troublesome to Jiave
touched.

" Of course," he was proceeding, " the Church-
ill gang would like to go on playing the
stand-off to us. But it won't do, they've got to
come in or see themselves left. Gurnard has
pretty well nobbled their old party press, so
they've got to begin all over again."

That was it — that was precisely it. Churchill
ought to have played the stand-off to people like
us — to have gone on playing it at whatever cost.
That was what I demanded of the world as I con-
ceived it. It was so much less troublesome in
that way. On the other hand, this was life — I
was living now and the cost of living is disillu-

[6i]

THE INHERITORS

sionment ; it was the price I had to pay. Obvious-
ly, a Foreign Minister had to have a semi-official
organ, or I supposed so. . . . " Mind you," Fox
whispered on, " I think myself, that it's a pity
he is supporting the Greenland business. The
thing's not altogether straight. But it's going to
be made to pay like hell, and there's the national
interest to be considered. If this Government
didn't take it up, some other would — ^and that
would give Gurnard and a lot of others a peg
against Churchill and his. We can't afford to
lose any more coaling stations in Greenland or
anywhere else. And, mind you, Mr. C. can look
after the interests of the niggers a good deal bet-
ter if he's a hand in tlie pie. You see the position,
eh?"

I wasn't actually listening to him, but I nodded
at proper intervals. I knew that he wanted me
to take that line in confidential conversations
with fellows seeking copy. I was quite resigned
to that. Incidentally, I was overcome by the
conviction — ^perhaps it was no more than a sen-
sation — that that girl was mixed up in this thing,
that her shadow was somewhere among trfe^
others flickering upon the sheet. I wanted to

[62]

f

CHAPTER FOUR

ask Fox if he knew her. But, then, in that ab-
surd business, I did not even know her name,
and the whole story would have sounded a little
mad. Just now, it suited me that Fox should
have a moderate idea of my sanity. Besides, the
thing was out of tone, I idealised her then. One
wouldn't talk about her in a smoking-room full
of men telling stories, and one wouldn't talk
about her at all to Fox.

The musical critic had been prowling about the
room with Fox's eyes upon him. He edged sud-
denly nearer, pushed a chair aside, and came
^ toward us.

" Hullo," he said, in an ostentatiously genial,
after-dinner voice, " what are you two chaps
a-talking about? "

" Private matters," Fox answered, without
moving a hair.

" Then I suppose I'm in the way? " the other
muttered. Fox did not answer.

" Wants a job," he said, watching the discom-
fited Teuton's retreat, " but, as I was saying— oh,
it pays both ways." He paused and fixed his eyes
on me. He had been explaining the financial
details of the matter, in which the Due de Mersch

[63]

O

THE INHERITORS

and Callan and Mrs. Hartly and all these people
clubbed together and started a paper which they
hired Fox to run, which was to bring their money
back again^ which was to scratch their backs,
which ... It was like the house that Jack
built; I wondered who Jack was. That was it,
who was Jack? It all hinged upon that.
" Why, yes," I said. " It seems rather neat."
" Of course," Fox wandered on, " you are won-
dering why the deuce I tell you all this. Fact
is, you'd hear it all if I didn't, and a good deal
more that isn't true besides. But I believe you're
the sort of chap to respect a confidence."

I didn't rise to the sentiment. I knew as well
as he did that he was bamboozling me, that he
was, as he said, only telling me — not the truth,
but just what I should hear everywhere. I did
not bear him any ill-will ; it was part of the game,
that. But the question was, who was Jack? It
might be Fox himself . . . There might, after
all, be some meaning in the farrago of nonsense
that that fantastic girl had let off upon me. Fox
really and in a figure of speech such as she al-
lowed herself, might be running a team consists
ing of the Due de Mersch and Mr. Churchill.

[64I

CHAPTER FOUR

He might really be backing a foreign, philan-
thropic ruler and State-founder, and a British
Foreign Minister, against the rather sinister
Chancellor of the Exchequer that Mr. Gurnard
undoubtedly was. It might suit him; perhaps he
had shares in something or other that depended
on the success of the Due de Mersch's Greenland
Protectorate. I knew well enough, you must
remember, that Fox was a big man — one of
those big men that remain permanently behind
the curtain, perhaps because they have a certain
lack of con:ieliness of one sort or another and
don't look well on the stage itself. And I un-
derstood now that if he had abandoned — ^as he
had done — ^half a dozen enterprises of his own
for the sake of the Hour, it must be because it
was very well worth his while. It was not merely
a question of the editorship of a paper; there
was something very much bigger in the back-
ground. My Dimensionist young lady, again,
might have other shares that depended on the
Chancellor of the Exchequer's blocking the way.
In that way she might very well talk allegorically
of herself as in alliance with Gurnard against Fox
and Churchill. I was at sea in that sort of thing

[65]

THE INHERITORS

— ^but I understood vaguely that something of
the sort was remotely possible.

I didn't feel called upon to back out of it on
that account, yet I very decidedly wished that the
thing could have been otherwise. For myself,
I came into the matter with clean hands — ^and I
was going to keep my hands clean ; otherwise, I
was at Fox's disposal.

" I understand," I said, the speech marking
my decision, " I shall have dealings with a good
many of the proprietors — I am the scratcher, in
fact, and you don't want me to make a fool of
myself."

" Well," he answered, gauging me with his
blue, gimlet eyes, " it's just as well to know."

" It's just as well to know," I echoed. It was
just as well to know.

[66]

CHAPTER FIVE

I HAD gone out into the blackness of the
night with a firmer step, with a new assur-
ance. I had had my interview, the thing
was definitely settled; the first thing in my life
that had ever been definitely settled; and I felt
I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped
me a good deal in the old days — ^he had helped
everybody, for that matter. You would probably
find traces of Lea's influence in the beginnings of
every writer of about my decade; of everybody
who ever did anything decent, and of some who
never got beyond the stage of burgeoning de-
cently. He had given me the material help that
a publisher's reader could give, until his profes-
sional reputation was endangered, and he had
given me the more valuable help that so few can
give. I had grown ashamed of this one-sided
friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of
that that I had taken to the wilds — to a hut
near a wood, and all the rest of what now seemed

[67J

THE INHERITORS

youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone,
not to be helped any more, until I could make
sofne return. As a natural result I had lost nearly
all my friends and found myself standing there as
naked as on the day I was born.

All around me stretched an immense town — ^an
immense blackness. People — ^thousands of peo-
ple hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had
others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had no-
body. This immense city, this immense black-
ness, had no interiors for me. There were house
fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but noth-
ing within; no rooms, no hollow places. The
houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than
the solid earth. Lea remained the only one the
thought of whom was not like the reconsidera-
tion of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.

He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher's
reader, he had to report upon the probable com-
mercial value of the manuscripts that unknown
authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he
had a settled plan of life, of the sort that brought
him within the radius of a given spot at appar-
ently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals.
It seemed to be no more than a piece of good

[68]

CHAPTER FIVE

luck that let me find him that night in a little
room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury. He
was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, sur-
rounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript,
a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He
peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.

" Hullo! " he said, ** what's brought you here?
Have a manuscript? " He waved an abstracted
hand round him. "You'll find a chair some-
where." A claret bottle stood on the floor be-
side him. He took it by the neck and passed it
to mc

He bent his head again and continued his read-
mg. I displaced three bulky folio sheaves of
typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself
behind him. He continued to read.

" I hadn't seen these rooms before," I said, for
want o£ something to say.

The room was not so much scantily as ar-
bitrarily furnished. It contained a big mahogany
sideboard ; a common deal table, an extraordinary
kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal book-
shelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs.
There were three framed Dutch prints on the
marble mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the

[69]

THE INHERITORS

windows. A square, cheap looking-glass, with
a razor above it, hung between them. And on
the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the
unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts.

He scribbled something on a blue paper and
began to roll a cigarette. He took off his glasses^
rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.

" Well, and how's Sussex? " he asked.

I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was
nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an
old course of life, was actually and finally break-
ing with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you
see, stood for what was best in the mode of
thought that I was casting aside. He stood for
the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness;
all the childish qualities, were my own importa-
tions. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that —
that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the
glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I
had been reading by had flickered out. But I
told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job
at last.

" Oh, I congratulate you," he said.

" You see," I began to combat the objections
he had not had time to utter, " even for my

[70]

CHAPTER FIVE

work it will be a good thing — I wasn't seeing
enough of life to be able to , • . "

" Oh, of course not," he answered — " it'll be a
good thing. You must have been having a pretty
bad time."

It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn't
taken up with the Hour because I was tired of
having a bad time, but for other reasons: be-
cause I had felt my soul being crushed within
me.

" You're mistaken," I said. And I explained.
He answered, " Yes, yes," but I fancied that
he was adding to himself — " They all say that."
I grew more angry. Lea's opinion formed, to
some extent, the background of my life. For
many years I had been writing quite as much to
satisfy him as to satisfy myself, and his coldness
chilled me. He thought that my heart was hot
in my work, and I did not want Lea to think
that of me. I tried to explain as much to him —
but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.

I knew there had been others that he had
fostered, only to see them, in the end, drift into
the back-wash. And now he thought I was go-
ing too « • .

[71]

THE INHERITORS

" Here/' he said, suddenly breaking away from
the subject, " look at that."

He threw a heavy, ribbon-bound mass of mat-
ter into my lap, and recommenced writing his
report upon its saleability as a book. He was of
opinion that it was too delicately good to attract
his employer's class of readers. I began to read
it to get rid of my thoughts. The heavy black
handwriting of the manuscript sticks in my
mind's eye. It must have been good, but prob-
ably not so good as I then thought it — I have
entirely forgotten all about it; otherwise, I re-
member that we argued afterward: I for its pub*
lication; he against. I was thinking of the
wretched author whose fate hung in the balance.
He became a pathetic possibility, hidden in the
heart of the white paper that bore pen-markings
of a kind too good to be marketable. There was
something appalling in Lea's careless — " Oh, it's
too good ! " He was used to it, but as for me, in
arguing that man's case I suddenly became aware
that I was pleading my own — pleading the case
of my better work. Everything that Lea said
of this work, of this man, applied to my work; and
to myself. " There's no market for that sort of

[72]

CHAPTER FIVE

thing, no public; this book's been all round the
trade. I've had it before. The man will never
come to the front. He'll take to inn-keeping,
and that will finish him off." That's what he
said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some
one was knocking at the door of the room — ^ten-
tative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was
one of those sounds that one does not notice im-
mediately. The man might have been knocking
for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's em-
ployer, the publisher of my first book. He
opened the door at last, and came in rather per-
emptorily. He had the air of having worked
himself into a temper— of being intellectually
rather afraid of Lea, but of being, for this occa-
sion, determined to assert himself.

The introduction to myself — I had never met
him — which took place after he had hastily
brought out half a sentence or so, had the effect
of putting him out of his stride, but, after hav-
ing remotely acknowledged the possibility of my
existence, he began again.

The matter was one of some delicacy. I
myself should have hesitated to broach it before
a third party, even one so negligible as myseli

[73]

THE INHERITORS

But Mr. Polehampton apparently did not. He
had to catch the last post.

Lea, it appeared, had advised him to publish
a manuscript by a man called Howden — ^ mod-
erately known writer. . . .

" But I am disturbed to find, Mr. Lea, that is,
my daughter tells me that the manuscript is
not . . . is not at all the thing. ... In
fact, it's quite — ^and — eh . • * I suppose it's
too late to draw back? "

" Oh, it's altogether too late for that/' Lea said,
nonchalantly, " Besides, Howden's theories al-
ways sell."

" Oh, yes, of course, of course," Mr. Polehamp-
ton interjected, hastily, " but don't you think
now ... I mean, taking into consideration
the damage it may do our reputation . . .
that we ought to ask Mr. Howden to accept, say
fifty pounds less than. . . ."

" I should think it's an excellent idea," Lea
said. Mr. Polehampton glanced at him sus-
piciously, then turned to me.

" You see," he began to explain, " one has to
be so careful about these things."

" Oh, I can quite understand," I answered.
There was something so naive in the man's point

[74]

1

CHAPTER FIVE

of view that I had felt my heart go out to him.
And he had taught me at last how it is that the
godly grow fat at the expense of the unrighteous.
Mr. Polehampton, however, was not fat. He
was even rather thin, and his peaked grey hair,
though it was actually well brushed, looked as
if it ought not to have been. He had even an
anxious expression. People said he speculated in
some stock or other, and I should say they were
right.

" I , . . eh . . . believe I published
your first book ... I lost money by it, but
I can assure you that I bear no grudge — almost
a hundred pounds. I bear no grudge . , . "

The man was an original. He had no idea that
I might feel insulted; indeed, he really wanted
to be pleasant, and condescending, and forgiving.
I didn't feel insulted. He was too big for his
clothes, gave that impression at least, and he wore
black kid gloves. Moreover, his eyes never left
the cornice of the room. I saw him rather often
after that night, but never without his gloves
and never with his eyes lowered.

" And ... eh ..." he asked, " what
are you doing now, Mr. Granger? "

Lea told him Fox had taken me up; that I

[751

THE INHERITORS

was going to go. I suddenly remembered it was
said of Fox that everyone he took up did " go."
The fact was obviously patent to Mr. Polehamp-
ton. He unbent with remarkable suddenness; it
reminded me of the abrupt closing of a stiff um-
brella. He became distinctly and crudely cordial
— hoped that we should work together again;
once more reminded me that he had published
my first book (the words had a different savour
now), and was enchanted to discover that we
were neighbours in Sussex. My cottage was
within four miles of his villa, and we were mem-
bers of the same golf club.

" We must have a game — several games," he
said. He struck me as the sort of man to find
a difficulty in getting anyone to play with him.

After that he went away. As I had said, I did
not dislike him — he was pathetic; but his tone
of mind, his sudden change of front, unnerved me.
It proved so absolutely that I was " going to go,"
and I did not want to go — in that sense. The
thing is a little difficult to explain, I wanted to
take the job because I wanted to have money —
for a little time, for a year or so, but if I once
began to go, the temptation would be strong to

[76]

CHAPTER FIVE

keep on going, and I was by no means sure that
I should be able to resist the temptation. So
many others had failed. What if I wrote to Fox,
and resigned? . . . Lea was deep in a manu-
script once more.

" Shall I throw it up? " I asked suddenly. I
wanted the thing settled.

" Oh, go on with it, by all means go on with it,"
Lea answered.

" And . . . ? " I postulated.

" Take your chance of the rest," he supplied;
" you've had a pretty bad time."

" I suppose," I reflected, " if I haven't got the
strength of mind to get out of it in time, I'm not
up to much."

"There's that, too," he commented, "the
game may not be worth the candle." I was
silent. " You must take your chance when you
get it," he added.

He had resumed his reading, but he looked up
again when I gave way, as I did after a moment's
thought.

" Of course," he said, " it will probably be all
right. You do your best. It's a good thing
. . . might even do you good."

[771

THE INHERITORS

In that way the thing went through. As I was
leaving the room, the idea occurred to me, " By
the way, you don't know anything of a clique:
the Dimensionists — Fourth Dimensionists? "

" Never heard of them,'* he negatived.
"What's their specialty?'*

** They're going to inherit the earth," I an-
swered.

" Oh, I wish them joy," he closed.

" You don't happen to be one yourself? I be-
lieve it's a sort of secret society." He wasn't
listening. I went out quietly.

The night effects of that particular neighbour-
hood have always affected me dismally. That
night they upset me, upset me in much the same
way, acting on much the same nerves as the valley
in which I had walked with that puzzling girl.
I remembered that she had said she stood for the
future, that she was a symbol of my own decay
— the whole silly farrago, in fact. I reasoned
with myself — that I was tired, out of trim, and
so on, that I was in a fit state to be at the mercy
of any nightmare. I plunged into Southampton
Row. There was safety in the contact with the
crowd, in jostling, in being jostled.

[78]

CHAPTER SIX

T was Saturday and, as was his custom during
the session, the Foreign Secretary had gone
for privacy and rest till Monday to a small
country house he had within easy reach of town.
I went down with a letter from Fox in my pocket,
and early in the afternoon found myself talking
without any kind of inward disturbance to the
Minister's aunt, a lean, elderly lady, with a keen
eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of
European politics. She had a rather abrupt man-
ner and a business-like, brown scheme of colora*
tion. She looked people very straight in the face,
bringing to bear all the penetration which, as
rumour said, enabled her to take a hidden, but
very real part in the shaping of our foreign policy.
She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay
me on the shelf, before I had given my first an-
swer to her first question.

" You ought to know this part of the country
well," she said. I think she was considering me

179]

THE INHERITORS

as a possible canvasser — ^an infinitesimal thing,
but of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the
next General Election.
" No," I said, " I've never been here before/'
" Etchingham is only three miles away."
It was new to me to be looked upon as worth
consideration for my place-name. I realised that
Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its ac-
count, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers
of Etchingham, who had taken to literature.

" I met your aunt yesterday," Miss Churchill
continued. She had met everybody yesterday.

" Yes," I said, non-committally. I wondered
what had happened at that meeting. My aunt
and I had never been upon terms. She was a
great personage in her part of the world, a great
dowager land-owner, as poor as a mouse, and as
respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen
politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who
am neither landowner, nor respectable, nor poli-
tician, had never been acknowledged — ^but I knew
that, for the sake of the race, she would have
refrained from enlarging on my shortcomings.

** Has she found a companion to suit her yet ? "
I said, absent-mindedly. I was thinking of an old

[8ol

CHAPTER SIX

legend of my mother's. Miss Churchill looked
me in between the eyes again. She was prepar-
ing to relabel me, I think. I had become a spite-
ful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for
platform malice.

" Why, yes,*' she said, the faintest of twinkles
in her eyes, " she has adopted a niece."

The legend went that, at a hotly contested elec-
tion in which my aunt had played a prominent
part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls.
" Who starved her governess? " it had inquired.

My accidental reference to such electioneering
details placed me upon an excellent footing with
Miss Churchill. I seemed quite imawares to
have asserted myself a social equal, a person not
to be treated as a casual journalist. I became,
in fact, not the representative of the Hour —
but an Etchingham Granger that competitive
forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum.
I began to see the line I was to take throughout
my interviewing campaign. On the one hand,
I was " one of us," who had temporarily strayed
beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a
sort of great author's bottle-holder.

A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened

[81]

THE INHERITORS

gently. There was something very characteris-
tic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar.
It seemed 'to say: "Why any noisy vigour?"
It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative
person with many things on his mind. A tall,
grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part
of his weight on the arm that was stretched down
to the handle. He was looking thoughtfully
at a letter that he held in his other hand. A
face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew
real to me — more real than the face of one's near-
est friends, yet older than one had any wish
to expect. It was as if I had gazed more intently
than usual at the face of a man I saw daily; and
had found him older and greyer than he had
ever seemed before — ^as if I had begun to realise
that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly — almost protestingly,
" What am I to do about the Due de Mersch? "

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost appre-
hensively, toward him. She uttered my name
and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance
— 2l start that meant, " Why wasn't I warned be-
fore? " This irritated me; I knew well enough
what were his relations with de Mersch, and the

[82]

CHAPTER SIX

man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose.
His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort
that would pass in a person of his eminence. He
stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose,
looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and
looked again. He had the air of looking down
from an immense height — of needing a telescope.

" Oh, ah . • . Mrs. Granger's son, I pre-
sume. ... I wasn't aware . . . " The
hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we
never should get anywhere — not for years and
years.

" No," I said, rather brusquely, " I'm only
from the Hour"

He thought me one of Fox's messengers then,
said that Fox might have written: " Have saved
you the trouble, I mean . . . or . . ."

He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of
wishing, even, to please me by proving that he
was aware of my identity.

" Oh," I said, a little loftily, " I haven't any
message, I've only come to interview you." An
expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his
face.

"To • . .'' he began, " but I've never al-

[83]

THE INHERITORS

lowed — " He recovered himself sharply, and
set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he
had found the right track. " Oh, I remember
now," he said, "I hadn't looked at it in that
way."

The whole thing grated on my self-love and
I became, in a contained way, furiously angry.
I was impressed with the idea that the man was
only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch,
and that lot. And he gave himself these airs
of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-
handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.

" Ah, yes," he said, hastily, " you are to draw
my portrait — as Fox put it. He sent me your
Jenkins sketch. I read it — it struck a very nice
note. And so — ." He sat himself down on a
preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with
his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find
the process a bore.

" Not more for me than for you," he answered*
seriously — " one has to do these things."

" Why, yes," I echoed, " one has to do these
things." It struck me that he regretted it — ^re-
gretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter
meaning to the words.

[84]

CHAPTER SIX

"And . . . what is the procedure?" he
asked, after a pause. " I am new to the sort of
thing/* He had the air, I thought, of talking
to some respectable tradesman that one calls in
only when one is in extremis — to a distinguished
pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a tree
of inferior timber.

" Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I an-
swered. " I'm supposed to get your atmosphere,
as Callan put it."

" Indeed," he answered, absently, and then,
after a pause, " You know Gallan? " I was afraid
I should fall in his estimation.

" One has to do these things," I said; " Fve
just been getting his atmosphere."

He looked again at the letter in his hand,
smoothed his necktie and was silent. I realised
that I was in the way, but I was still so disturbed
that I forgot how to phrase an excuse for a mo-
mentary absence.

" Perhaps, . . . " I began.

He looked at me attentively.

" I mean, I think Fm in the way," I blurted
out.

Well," he answered, "it's quite a small

[85]

i(

THE INHERITORS

matter. But, if you are to get my atmosphere,
we may as well begin out of doors." He hesi-
tated, pleased with his witticism; " Unless you're
tired," he added.

" I will go and get ready," I said, as if I were
a lady with bonnet-strings to tie. I was con-
ducted to my room, where I kicked my heels
for a decent interval. When I descended, Mr.
Churchill was lounging about the room with his
hands in his trouser-pockets and his head hanging
limply over his chest. He said, "Ah!" on
seeing me, as if he had forgotten my existence.
He paused for a long moment, looked medita-
tively at himself in the glass over the fire-
place, and then grew brisk. '" Come along," he
said.

We took a longish walk through a lush home-
country meadow land. We talked about a num-
ber, of things, he opening the ball with that in-
fernal Jenkins sketch. I was in the stage at
which one is sick of the thing, tired of the bare
idea of it — and Mr. Churchill's laboriously kind
phrases made the matter no better.

" You know who Jenkins stands for? " I asked.
I wanted to get away on the side issues.

[86]

CHAPTER SIX

*' Oh, I guessed it was '' he answered.

They said that Mr. Churchill was an enthusiast
for the school of painting of which Jenkins was
the last exponent. He began to ask questions
about him. Did he still paint? Was he even
alive?

*' I once saw several of his pictures," he re-
flected. " His work certainly appealed to me
. . . yes, it appealed to me. I meant at the
time . • . but one forgets; there are so
many things." It seemed to me that the man
wished by these detached sentences to convey
that he had the weight of a kingdom — of several
kingdoms— on his mind ; that he could spare no
more than a fragment of his thoughts for every-
day use.

" You must take me to see him," he said, sud-
denly. " I ought to have something." I thought
of poor white-haired Jenkins, and of his long
struggle with adversity. It seemed a little cruel
that Churchill should talk in that way without
meaning a word of it — as if the words were a
polite formality.

"Nothing would delight me more," I an-
sweredy and added, " nothing in the world."

1871

THE INHERITORS

He asked me if I had seen such and such a pict-
ure, talked of artists, and praised this and that
man very fittingly, but with a certain timidity —
a timidity that lured me back to my normally
overbearing frame of mind. In such matters I
was used to hearing my own voice. I could talk
a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness
of things, I talked Churchill down. The position,
even then, struck me as gently humorous. It
was as if some infinitely small animal were bully-
ing some colossus among the beasts. I was of
no account in the world, he had his say among
the Olympians. And I talked recklessly, like any
little school-master, and he swallowed it.

We reached the broad market-place of a little,
red and grey, home county town; a place of but
one street dominated by a great inn-signboard
a-top of an enormous white post. The effigy of
So-and-So of gracious memory swung lazily,
creaking, overhead.

" This is Etchingham," Churchill said.

It was a pleasant commentary on the course of
time, this entry into the home of my ancestors.
I had been without the pale for so long, that I
had never seen the haunt of ancient peace. They

188]

CHAPTER SIX

had done very little, the Grangers of Etching-
ham — never anything but live at Etchingham and
quarrel at Etchingham and die at Etchingham
and be the monstrous important Grangers of
Etchingham. My father had had the undesirable
touch, not of the genius, but of the Bohemian.
The Grangers of Etchingham had cut him adrift
and he had swum to sink in other seas. Now I
was the last of the Grangers and, as things went,
was quite the best known of all of them. They
had grown poor in their generation; they bade
fair to sink, even as, it seemed, I bade fair to rise,
and I had come back to the old places on the arm
of one of the great ones of the earth. I wondered
what the portentous old woman who ruled alone
in Etchingham thought of these times — ^the por-
tentous old woman who ruled, so they said, the
place with a rod of iron; who made herself un-
bearable to her companions and had to fall back
upon an unfortunate niece. I wondered idly who
the niece could be; certainly not a Granger of
Etchingham, for I was the only one of the breeds
One of her own nieces, most probably. Churchill
had gone into the post-office, leaving me stand-
ing at the foot of the sign-post. It was a pleas-

[89]

THE INHERITORS

ant summer day, the air very clear, the place very
slumbrous. I looked up the street at a pair of
great stone gate-posts, august, in their way,
standing distinctly aloof from the common houses,
a little weather-stained, staidly Uchened. At the
top of each column sat a sculptured wolf — ^as far
as I knew, my own crest. It struck me pleas-
antly that this must be the entrance of the Manor
house.

The tall iron gates swung inward, and I saw
a girl on a bicycle curve out, at the top of the
sunny street. She glided, very clear, small, and
defined, against the glowing wall, leaned aslant
for the turn, and came shining down toward
me. My heart leapt; she brought the whole
thing into composition — the whole of that slum-
brous, sunny street. The bright sky fell back
into place, the red roofs, the blue shadows, the
red and blue of the sign-board, the blue of the
pigeons walking round my feet, the bright red of
a postman's cart. She was gliding toward me,
growing and growing into the central figure.
She descended and stood close to me.

"You?" I said. "What blessed chance
brought you here? "

[90]

CHAPTER SIX

" Oh, I am your aunt's companion/* she an*
swered, " her niece, you know."

" Then you mtist be a cousin," I said.

" No; sister," she corrected, " I assure you it's
sister. Ask anyone — ^ask your aunt." I was
braced into a state of puzzled buoyancy.

" But really, you know," I said. She was smil-
ing, standing up squarely to me, leaning a little
back, swaying her machine with the motion of
her body.

" It's a little ridiculous, isn't it? " she said.

" Very," I answered, " but even at that, I don't
see — And I'm not phenomenally dense."

" Not phenomenally," she answered,

" Considering that I'm not a — ^not a Dimen-
sionist, " I bantered. " But you have really
palmed yourself off on my aunt? "

" Really," she answered, " she doesn't know
any better. She believes in me immensely. I
am such a real Granger, there never was a more
typical one. And we shake our heads together
over you," My bewilderment was infinite, but
it stopped short of being unpleasant.

"Might I call on my aunt?" I asked. "It
wouldn't interfere "

[91]

THE INHERITORS

" Oh, it wouldn't interfere,*' she said, " but we
leave for Paris to-morrow. We are very busy.
We — ^that is, my aunt; I am too young ao^ too,
too discreet — ^have a little salon where we hatch
plots against half the regimes in Europe. You
have no idea how Legitimate we are."

" I don't understand in the least," I said; " not
in the least."

" Oh, you must take me literally if you want
to understand," she answered, " and you won't
do that. I tell you plainly that I find my account
in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling
them. Everywhere. You will see."

She spoke with her monstrous dispassionate-
ness, and I felt a shiver pass down my spine, very
distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if
ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced
to stand in her way — as her husband, for example.

" I wish you would talk sense — for one blessed
minute," I said; " I want to get things a little
settled in my mind."

" Oh, I'll talk sense," she said, " by the hour,
but you won't listen. Take your friend, Churchill,
now. He's the man that we're going to bring
down. I mentioned it to you, and so ... "

[92]

CHAPTER SIX

" But this is sheer madness/' I answered.

*' Oh, no, it's a bald statement of fact," she went
on.

" I don't see how," I said, involuntarily.

" Your article in the Hour will help. Every
trifle will help," she said. "Things that you
understand and others that you cannot. . . .
He is identifying himself with the Due de Mersch.
That looks nothing, but it's fatal. There will be
friendships . . . and desertions."

" Ah! " I said. I had had an inkling of this,
and it made me respect her insight into home
politics. She must have been alluding to Gur-
nard, whom everybody — ^perhaps from fear —
pretended to trust. She looked at me and
smiled again. It was still the same smile; she
was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow.
"Do you know I don't like to hear that?" I
began.

" Oh, there's irony in it, and pathos, and that
sort of thing," she said, with the remotest chill
of mockery in her intonation. " He goes into it
clean-handed enough and he only half likes it.
But he sees that it's his last chance. It's not that
he's worn out — ^but he feels that his time has

[93]

THE INHERITORS

come — unless he does something. And so he's
going to do something. You understand? "

" Not in the least," I said, light-heartedly.

" Oh, it's the System for the Regeneration of
the Arctic Regions — ^the Greenland affair of my
friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a
grand coup with that — ^to keep himself from slip-
ping down hill, and, of course, it would add im-
mensely to your national prestige. And he only
half sees what de Mersch is or isn't"

** This is all Greek to me," I muttered rebel-
liously.

" Oh, I know, I kiiow," she said. " But one
has to do these things, and I want you to under-
stand. So Churchill doesn't like the whole
business. But he's under the shadow. He's been
thinking a good deal lately that his day is over —
ril prove it to you in a minute — and so— oh, he's
going to make a desperate effort to get in touch
with the spirit of the times that he doesn't like
and doesn't understand. So he lets you get his
atmosphere. That's all."

" Oh, that's a//," I said, ironically.

** Of course he'd have liked to go on playing
the stand-off to chaps like you and me," she

[94]

CHAPTER SIX

mimicked the tone and words of Fox him-
self.

" This is witchcraft," I said. " How in the
world do you know what Fox said to me? '*

" Oh, I know," she said. It seemed to me
that she was playing me with all this nonsense
— ^as if she must have known that I had a tender-
ness for her and were fooling me to the top of
her bent. I tried to get my hook in.

" Now look here," I said, " we must get things
settled. You ..."

She carried the speech off from under my nose.

" Oh, you won't denounce me," she said, " not
any more than you did before ; there are so many
reasons. There would be a scene, and you're
afraid of scenes — ^and our aunt would back me
up. She'd have to. My money has been reviv-
ing the glories of the Grangers. You can see,
they've been regilding the gate."

I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron
gates through which she had passed into my
view. It was true enough — ^some of the scroll
work was radiant with new gold.

" Well," I said, " I will give you credit for not
wishing to — ^to prey upon my aunt. But still

[95]

THE INHERITORS

. . . *' I was trying to make the thing out.
It struck me that she was an American of the
kind that subsidizes households like that of Etch-
ingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even
forced her to take the family name, to save ap-
pearances. The old woman was capable of any-
thing, even of providing an obscure nephew with
a brilliant sister. And I should not be thanked if
I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning
passed between word and word ..." You
are no sister of mine! " I was continuing my
sentence quite amiably.

Her face brightened to greet someone ap-
proaching behind me.

" Did you hear him ? " she said. " Did you hear
him, Mr. Churchill. He casts off — ^he disowns
me. Isn't he a stern brother? And the quarrel
is about nothing." The impudence — or the pres-
ence of mind of it — overwhelmed me.

Churchill smiled pleasantly.

" Oh--one always quarrels about nothing,"
Churchill answered. He spoke a few words to
her; about my aunt; about the way her machine
ran — ^that sort of thing. He behaved toward
her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent

[96]

CHAPTER SIX

with licence and welcome enough. He himself
looked rather like the short-sighted, but indul-
gent and very meagre lion that peers at the uni-
corn across a plum-cake.

So you are going back to Paris," he said.

Miss Churchill will be sorry. And you arc
going to continue to— to break up the uni-
verse? "

" Oh, yes," she answered, " we are going on
with that, my aunt would never give it up. She
couldn't, you know."

" You'll get into trouble," Churchill said, as if
he were talking to a child intent on stealing
apples. "And when is our turn coming?
You're going to restore the Stuarts, aren't you? "
It was his idea of badinage, amiable without
consequence.

" Oh, not quite that," she answered, " not quit€
that." It was curious to watch her talking to
another man — to a man, not a bagman like Cal-
lan. She put aside the face she always showed me
and became at once what Churchill took her for
— a spoiled child. At times she suggested a cer-
tain kind of American, and had that indefinable
air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none

[97]

THE INHERITORS

of the spirit of tradition. One half expected her
to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.

" Oh, you know," she said, with a fine affecta-
tion of aloofness, " we shall have to be rather hard
upon you; we shall crumple you up like — "
Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mind-
edly in the dust of the road, he had produced a
big *' C H U." She had erased it with the point
of her foot — " like that," she concluded.

He laid his head back and laughed almost
heartily.

" Dear me," he said, " I had no idea that I was
so much in the way of — of yourself and Mrs.
Granger."

" Oh, it's not only that," she said, with a little
smile and a cast of the eye to me. " But you've
got to make way for the future."

Churchill's face changed suddenly. He looked
rather old, and grey, and wintry, even a little frail.
I understood what she was proving to me, and I
rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly
cruel to remind a man of what he was trying to
forget.

" Ah, yes," he said, with the gentle sadness of
quite an old man, " I dare say there is more in

[98]

CHAPTER SIX

that than you think. Even you will have to
leam."

" But not for a long time/' she interrupted
audaciously.

" I hope not," he answered, " I hope not."
She nodded and glided away.

We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill
smiled at his own thoughts once or twice.

"A most amusing . . ." he said at last.
" She does me a great deal of good, a great deal."

I think he meant that she distracted his
thoughts.

" Does she always talk like that? " I asked.
He had hardly spoken to me, and I felt as if I
were interrupting a reverie^ — ^but I wanted to
know.

" I should say she did," he answered; " I should
say so. But Miss Churchill says that she has a
real genius for organization. She used to see a
good deal of them, before they went to Paris,
you know."

" What are they doing there? " It was as if
I were extracting secrets from a sleep-walker.

" Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for
all kinds of Legitimist pretenders — French and

[991

THE INHERITORS

Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs.
Granger takes it very seriously." He looked at
me suddenly. " But you ought to know more
about it than I do/' he said.

" Oh, we see very little of each other/* I an-
swered, "you could hardly call us brother and
sister."

" Oh, I see," he answered. I don't know what
he saw. For myself, I saw nothing.

t lOO]

'* - •

CHAPTER SEVEN

I SUCCEEDED in giving Fox what his jour-
nal wanted ; I got the atmosphere of Church-
ill and his house, in a way that satisfied the
people for whom it was meant. His house was
a pleasant enough place, of the sort where they
do you well, but not nauseously well. It stood
in a tranquil countryside, and stood there mod-
estly. Architecturally speaking, it was gently
commonplace; one got used to it and liked it.
And Churchill himself, when one had become ac-
customed to his manner, one liked very well —
very well indeed. He had a dainty, dilettante
mind, delicately balanced, with strong limita-
tions, a fantastic temperament for a person in his
walk of life — but sane, mind you, persistent. Af-
ter a time^ I amused myself with a theory that
his heart was not in his work, that circumstance
had driven him into the career of politics and
ironical fate set him at its head. For myself, I
had an intense contempt for the political mind,

[lOl]

• -TOE INHERITORS

and it struck me that he had some of the same
feeling. He had little personal quaintnesses,
too, a deference, a modesty, an open-minded-
ness.

I was with him for the greater part of his week-
end holiday; hung, perforce, about him whenever
he had any leisure. I suppose he found me tire-
some — but one has to do these things. He
talked, and I talked; heavens, how we talked!
He was almost always deferential, I almost always
dogmatic ; perhaps because the conversation kept
on my own ground. Politics we never touched.
I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I should
be checked — politely, but very definitely. Per-
haps he actually contrived to convey as much to
me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I were to
say:

" What do you think about the * Greenland
System ' " — he would answer:

" I try not to think about it," or whatever
gently closuring phrase his mind conceived. But
I never did so ; there were so many other topics.

He was then writing his Life of Cromwell and
his mind was very full of his subject. Once he
opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for

[102]

CHAPTER SEVEN

signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest
chance— one of those blind chances that inevit-
ably lead in the future — that I, too, was obsessed
at that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great
many years before, when I was a yearling of
tremendous plans, I had set about one of those
glorious novels that one plans — ^a splendid thing
with Old Noll as the hero or the heavy father.
I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local
colour and had wonderfully well invested my
half-crowns.^ Thus a company of seventeenth
century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very
glorious under their dust, accompany me through
life. One parts last with those relics of a golden
age, and during my late convalescence I had re-
read many of them, the arbitrary half-remem-
bered phrases suggesting all sorts of scenes —
lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-
beaten books. So, even then, my mind was full
of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr. Churchill on Crom-
well amused me immensely and even excited me.
It was life, this attending at a self-revelation of
an impossible temperament. It did me good, as
he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic
— ^as fantastic as herself — ^and it came out more

[103I

THE INHERITORS

in his conversation than in the book itself. I had
something to do with that, of course. But im-
agine the treatment accorded to Cromwell by
this delicate, negative, obstinately judicial person-
ality. It was the sort of thing one wants to get
into a novel. It was a lesson to me — in tempera-
ment, in point of view; I went with his mood,
tried even to outdo him, in the hope of spurring
him to outdo himself. I only mention it because
I did it so well that it led to extraordinary conse-
quences.

We were walking up and down his lawn, in the
twilight, after his Sunday supp^. The pale light
shone along the gleaming laurels and dwelt upon
the soft clouds of orchard blossoms that shim-
mered above them. It dwelt, too, upon the silver
streaks in his dark hair and made his face seem
more pallid, and more old. It affected me like
some intense piece of irony. It was like hearing
a dying man talk of the year after next. I had
the sense of the unreality of things strong upon
me. Why should nightingale upon nightingale
pour out volley upon volley of song for the de-
light of a politician whose heart was not in his
task of keeping back the waters of the deluge,

[104]

CHAPTER SEVEN

but who grew animated at the idea of damning
one of the titans who had let loose the deluge?

About a week after--or it may have been a
fortnight — Churchill wrote to me and asked me
to take him to see the Jenkins of my Jenkins
story. It was one of those ordeals that one goes
through when one has tried to advance one's
friends. Jenkins took the matter amiss, thought
it was a display of insulting patronage on the
part of officialism. He was reluctant to show
his best work, the forgotten masterpieces, the
things that had never sold, that hung about on
the faded walls and rotted in cellars. He would
not be his genial self; he would not talk. , Church-
ill behaved very well — I think he understood.

Jenkins thawed before his gentle appreciations.
I could see the change operating within him. He
began to realise that this incredible visit from a
man who ought to be hand and glove with Acade-
micians was something other than a spy's en-
croachment. He was old, you must remember,
and entirely unsuccessful. He had fought a hard
fight and had been worsted. He took his re-
venge in these suspicions.

We younger men adored him. He had the

[105]

THE INHERITORS

ruddy face and the archaic silver hair of the King
of Hearts; and a wonderful elaborate politeness
that he had inherited from his youth — ^from the
days of Brummell. And, whilst all his belongings
were rotting into dust, he retained an extraordi-
narily youthful and ingenuous habit of mind. It
was that, or a little of it, that gave the charm
to my Jenkins story.

It was a disagreeable experience. I wished so
much that the perennial hopefulness of the man
should at last escape deferring and I was afraid
that Churchill would chill before Jenkins had time
to thaw. But, as I have said, I think Churchill
understood. He smiled his kindly, short-sighted
smile over canvas after canvas, praised the right
thing in each, remembered having seen this
and that in such and such a year, and Jenkins
thawed.

He happened to leave the room — to fetch some
studies, to hurry up the tea or for some such
reason. Bereft of his presence the place suddenly
grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in
the sky and left us in that nether world where
dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless light.
Jenkins' palette glowed from above a medley of

{106}

CHAPTER SEVEN

stained rags on his open colour table. The
rush-bottom of his chair resembled a wind-torn
thatch.

" One can draw morals from a life like that,"
I said suddenly. I was thinking rather of Jenkins
than of the man I was talking to.

" Why, yes," he said, absently, " I suppose
there are men who haven't the knack of getting

on.

((

It*s more than a knack," I said, with unneces-
sary bitterness. " It's a temperament."
* " I think it's a habit, too. It may be acquired,
mayn't it?"

" No, no," I fulminated, " it's precisely because
it can't be acquired that the best men — the men
like ..." I stopped suddenly, impressed
by the idea that the thing was out of tone. I
had to assert myself more than I liked in talking
to Churchill. Otherwise I should have disap-
peared. A word from him had the weight of
three kingdoms and several colonies behind it,
and I was forced to get that out of my head by
making conversation a mere matter of tempera-
ment. Im 'that I was the stronger. If I wanted
to say a thing, I said it ; but he was hampered by

[ 107 ]

THE INHERITORS

a judicial mind. It seemed, too, that he liked a
dictatorial interlocutor, else he would hardly have
brought himself into contact with me again. Per-
haps it was new to him. My eye fell upon a cou-
ple of masks, hanging one on each side of the fire-
place. The room was full of a profusion of little
casts, thick with dust upon the shoulders, the
hair, the eyelids, on every part that projected out-
ward.

" By-the-bye," I said, " that's a death-mask of
Cromwell."

" Ah! " he answered, " I knew there was ..."

He moved very slowly toward it, rather as if
he did not wish to bring it within his field of view.
He stopped before reaching it and pivotted slowly
to face me.

"About my book," he opened suddenly, "I
have so little time." His briskness dropped into
a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal
of impotence. " I have been at it four years
now. It struck me — ^you seemed to coincide so
singularly with my ideas."

His speech came wavering to a close, but he
recommenced it apologetically — ^as if he wished
me to help him out.

[io8]

CHAPTER SEVEN

*' I went to see Smithson the publisher about
it, and he said he had no objection , • ."

He looked appealingly at me. I kept si*
lence.

" Of course, it's not your sort of work. But
you might try . . . You see . . ." He
came to a sustained halt.

" I don't understand," I said, rather coldly,
when the silence became embarrassing. " You
want me to * ghost ' for you? "

" ' Ghost,' good gracious no," he said, ener-
getically; " dear me, no ! "

" Then I really don't understand," I said.

" I thought you might see your ... I
wanted you to collaborate with me. Quite pub-
licly, of course, as far as the epithet applies."

"To collaborate," I said slowly. "You . . ."

I was looking at a miniature of the Farnese
Hercules — I wondered what it meant, what club
had struck the wheel of my fortune and whirled
it into this astounding attitude.

Of course you must think about it," he said.
I don't know," I muttered; " the idea is so
new. It's so little in my line. I don't know
what I should make of it."

[109]

it

it

THE INHERITORS

I talked at random. There were so many
thoughts jostling in my head. It seemed to carry
me so much farther from the kind of work I
wanted to do. I did not really doubt my ability
— one does not. I rather regarded it as work
upon a lower plane. And it was a tremendous
— ^an incredibly tremendous— opportunity.

" You know pretty well how much I've done,"
he continued. " I've got a good deal of material
together and a good deal of the actual writing is
done. But there is ever so much still to do. It's
getting beyond me, as I said just now."

I looked at him again, rather incredulously.
He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black
with a mosaic of white about the throat. The
slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost
impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness. He
so much meant what he said that he ignored what
his hands were doing, or his body or his head.
He had taken a very small, very dusty book out
of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turn-
ing over the rusty leaves, while he talked with
his head bent over it. What was I to him, or
he to me?

" I could give my Saturday afternoons to it/'

[no]

CHAPTER SEVEN

he was saying, "whenever you could come
down."

" It's immensely kind of you," I began.

" Not at all, not at all," he waived. " I've set
my heart on doing it and, unless you help me, I
don't suppose I ever shall get it done."

" But there are hundreds of others," I said.

" There may be," he said, " there may be.
But I have not come across them."

I was beset by a sudden emotion of blind can-
dour.

" Oh, nonsense, nonsense," I said. " Don't
you see that you are offering me the chance of
a lifetime? "

Churchill laughed.

" After all, one cannot refuse to take what of-
fers," he said. " Besides, your right man to do
the work might not suit me as a collaborator."

" It's very tempting," I said.

" Why, then, succumb," he smiled.

I could not find arguments against him, and
I succumbed as Jenkins re-entered the room.

[Ill]

CHAPTER EIGHT

AFTER that I began to live, as one lives;
and for forty-nine weeks. I know it was
forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmos-
pheres in all; Callan's and Churchill's, and those
forty-nine and the last one that finished the job
and the year of it. It was amusing work in its
way; people mostly preferred to have their at-
mospheres taken at their country houses — ^it
showed that they had them, I suppose. Thus I
spent a couple of days out of every week in agree-
able resorts, and people were very nice to me — ^it
was part of the game.

So I had a pretty good time for a year and en-
joyed it, probably because I had had a pretty
bad one for several years. I filled in the rest of
my weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with
Mr. Churchill and adoring Mrs. Hartly at odd
moments. I used to hang about the office of
the Hour on the chance of snapping up a blank

I 112]

CHAPTER EIGHT

three lines fit for a subtle puff of her. Some-
tunes they were too hurried to be subtle, and
then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.

I never understood her in the least, and I very
much doubt whether she ever understood a word
I said. I imagine that I must have talked to her
about her art or her mission — things obviously
as strange to her as to the excellent Hartly him-
self. I suppose she hadn't any art ; I am certain
she hadn't any mission, except to be adored. She
walked about the stage and one adored her, just
as she sat about her flat and was adored, and there
the matter ended.

As for Fox, I seemed to suit him — I don't in
the least know why. No doubt he knew me bet-
ter than I knew myself. He used to get hold
of me whilst I was hanging about the office on
the chance of engaging space for Mrs. Hartly,
and he used to utilise me for the ignoblest things.
I saw men for him, scribbled notes for him, abused
people through the telephone, and^ wrote articles.
Of course, there were the pickings.

I never understood Fox — ^not in the least, not
more than I understood Mrs. Hartly. He had
the mannerisms of the most incredible vulgarian

["31

THE INHERITORS

and had, apparently, the point of view of a pig.
But there was something else that obscured all
that, that forced one to call him a wonderful man.
Everyone called him that. He used to say that
he knew what he wanted and that he got it, and
that was true, too. I didn't in the least want to
do his odd jobs, even for the ensuing pickings,
and I didn't want to be hail-fellow with him. But
I did them and I was, without even realising that
it was distasteful to me. It was probably the
same with everybody else.

I used to have an idea that I was going to
reform him; that one day I should make him
convert the Hour into an asylum for writers of
merit. He used to let me have my own way
sometimes — ^just often enough to keep my con-
science from inconveniencing me. He let me
present Lea with an occasional column and a
half; and once he promised me that one day he
would allow me to get the atmosphere of Arthur
Edwards, the novelist.

Then there was Churchill and the Life of
Cromwell that progressed slowly. The experi-
ment succeeded well enough, as I grew less domi-
neering and he less embarrassed. Toward the

[114]

k

CHAPTER EIGHT

end I seemed to have become a familiar inmate
of his house. I used to go down with him on
Saturday afternoons and we talked things over in
the train. It was, to an idler like myself, won-
derful the way that essential idler's days were
cut out and fitted in like the squares of a child's
puzzle ; little passages of work of one kind fitting
into quite unrelated passages of something else.
He did it well, too, without the remotest sem-
blance of hurry.

I suppose that actually the motive power was
his aunt. People used to say so, but it did not
appear on the surface to anyone in close contact
with the man; or it appeared only in very small
things. We used to work in a tall, dark, pleasant
room, book-lined, and giving on to a lawn that
was always an asylum for furtive thrushes. Miss
Churchill, as a rule, sat half forgotten near the
window, with the light falling over her shoulder.
She was always very absorbed in papers ; seemed
to be spending laborious days in answering let-
ters, in evolving reports. Occasionally she ad-
dressed a question to her nephew, occasionally
received guests that came informally but could
not be refused admittance. Once it was a semi-

THE INHERITORS

royal personage, once the Due de Mersch, my
reputed employer.

The latter, I remember, was announced when
Churchill and I were finally finishing our account
of the tremendous passing of the Protector. In
that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast
noise of the storm in that twilight of the crown-
ing mercy. I seemed to see the candles a-flicker
in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room;
the great bed and the portentous uncouth form
that struggled in the shadows of the hangings.
Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had
been placed in her hands.

" Edward," she said, " the Due de Mersch."

Churchill rose irritably from his low seat
"Confound him," he said, " I won't see him."

"You can't help it, I think," his aunt said,
reflectively; "you will have to settle it sooner
or later."

I know pretty well what it was they had to
settle — ^the Greenland affair that had hung in the
dir so long. I knew it from hearsay, from Fox,
vaguely enough. Mr. Gurnard was said to
recommend it for financial reasons, the Due to
be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccount-

[116]

CHAPTER EIGHT

ably. I never had much head for details of this
sort, but people used to explain them to me —
to explain the reasons for de Mersch's eagerness.
They were rather shabby, rather incredible rea-
sons, that sounded too reasonable to be true. He
wanted the money for his railways — wanted it
very badly. He was vastly in want of money,
he was this, that, and the other in certain inter-
national-philanthropic concerns, and had a finger
in this, that, and the other pie. There was an
" All Round the World Cable Company " that
united hearts and hands, and a " Pan-European
Railway, Exploration, and Civilisation Company "
that let in light in dark places, and an " Inter-
national Housing of the Poor Company," as well
as a number of others. Somewhere at the bot-
tom of these seemingly bottomless concerns, the
Due de Mersch was said to be moving, and the
Hour certainly contained periodically complimen-
tary allusions to their higher philanthropy and
dividend-earning prospects. But that was ad
much as I knew. The same people — ^peqple one
met in smoking-rooms — said that the Trans-
Greenland Railway was the last card of de Mersch.
British investors wouldn't trust the Due without

[117]

THE INHERITORS

some sort of guarantee from the British Govern-
ment, and no other investor would trust him on
any terms. England was to guarantee something
or other — the interest for a number of years, I
suppose. I didn't believe them, of course— one
makes it a practice to believe nothing of the sort.
But I recognised that the evening was momentous
to somebody — that Mr. Gurnard and the Due de
Mersch and Churchill were to discuss something
and that I was remotely interested because the
Hour employed me.

Churchill continued to pace up and down.

" Gurnard dines here to-night," his aunt said.

" Oh, I see." His hands played with some
coins in his trouser-pockets. " I see," he said
again, " they've ..."

The occasion impressed me. I remember very
well the manner of both nephew and aunt. They
seemed to be suddenly called to come to a de-
cision that was no easy one, that they had wished
to relegate to an indefinite future.

She left Churchill pacing nervously up and
down.

" I could go on with something else, if you
like," I said.

[ii8]

CHAPTER EIGHT

" But I don't like," he said, energetically; " I'd
much rather not see the man. You know the
sort of person he is."

" Why, no," I answered, ^' I never studied the
Almanac de Gotha."

" Oh, I forgot," he said. He seemed vexed
with himself.

Churchill's dinners were frequently rather try-
ing to me. Personages of enormous importance
used to drop in — ^and reveal themselves as rather
asinine. At the best of times they sat dimly op-
posite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared.
Sometimes they stared me down. That night
there were two of them.

Gurnard I had heard of. One can't help hear-
ing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. The books
of reference said that he was the son of one Will-
iam Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember
that once in my club a man who professed to
know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard,
Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman),
was only an adoptive father. His rapid rise
seemed to me inexplicable till the same man ac-
counted for it with a shrug: "When a man of
such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at

[119]

THE INHERITORS

nothing, there's no saying how far he may go.
He has kicked away every ladder. He doesn't
mean to come down."

This, no doubt, explained much; but not every-
thing in his fabulous career. His adherents
called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set
him down a mere politician. He was a man of
forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy as-
surance of manner. He was indifferent to at-
tacks upon his character, but crushed mercilessly
every one who menaced his position. He stood
alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was
afraid of him. ^

Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table
ornaments; the Due de Mersch glowed with
light and talked voluminously, as if he had for
years and years been starved of human society.
He glowed all over, it seemed to me. He had a
glorious beard, that let one see very little of his
florid face and took the edge away from an almost
non-existent forehead and depressingly wrinkled
eyelids. He spoke excellent English, rather
slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to
his health. It struck me that he seemed to treat
Churchill in nuances as an inferior, whilst for the

[120]

CHAPTER EIGHT

invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of

>

nervous self-assertion. He had apparently come
to dilate on the Systhne Groenlandais, and he
dilated. Some mistaken persons had insinuated
that the Systhne was neither more nor less than
a corporate exploitation of unhappy Esquimaux.
De Mersch emphatically declared that those mis-
taken people were mistaken, declared it with
official finality. The Esquimaux were not un-
happy. I paid attention to my dinner, and let
the discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean
Protectorate lapse into an unheeded murmur.
I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.

Suddenly, however, it struck me that de Mersch
was talking at me; that he had by the merest
shade raised his intonation. He was dilating upon
the immense international value of the proposed
Trans-Greenland Railway. Its importance to
British trade was indisputable; even the op-
position had no serious arguments to offer. It
was the obvious duty of the British Government
to give the financial guarantee. He would not
insist upon the moral aspect of the work — ^it was
unnecessary. Progress, improvement, civilisa-
tion, 4 little less evil in the world — mov^ light 1 It

THE INHERITORS

was our duty not to count the cost of humanising
a lower race. Besides, the thing would pay like
another Suez Canal. Its terminus and the Britn
ish coaling station would be on the west coast of
the island. ... I knew the man was talking
at me — I wondered why.

Suddenly he turned his glowing countenance
full upon me.

" I think I must have met a member of your
family," he said. The solution occurred to me.
I was a journalist, he a person interested in a rail-
way that he wished the Government to back in
some way or another. His attempts to capture
my suffrage no longer astonished me. I mur-
mured :

"Indeed!"

" In Paris — Mrs. Etchingham Granger," he
said.

I s^id, " Oh, yes."

Miss Churchill came to the rescue.

" The Due de Mersch means oiu" friend, your
aunt," she explained. I had an unpleasant sen-
sation. Through fronds of asparagus fern I
caught the eyes of Gurnard fixed upon me as
though something had drawn his attention. I

[122]

CHAPTER EIGHT

returned his glance, tried to make his face out.
It had nothing distinctive in its half-hidden pallid
oval; nothing that one could seize upon. But it
gave the impression of never having seen the light
of day, of never having had the sun upon it. But
the conviction that I had aroused his attention
disturbed me. What could the man know about
me? I seemed to feel his glance bore through
the irises of my eyes into the back of my skull.
The feeling was almost physical; it was as if some
incredibly concentrant reflector had been turned
upon me. Then the eyelids dropped over the
metallic rings beneath them. Miss Churchill
continued to explain.

** She has started a sort of Salon des Causes
Perdues in the Faubourg Saint Germain." She
was recording the vagaries of my aunt. The
Due laughed*

" Ah, yes," he said, *' what a menagerie — Car-
lists, and Orleanists, and Papal Blacks. I wonder
she has not held a bazaar in favour of your White
Rose League."

" Ah, yes," I echoed, " I have heard that she
was mad about the divine right of kings."

Miss Churchill rose, as ladies rise at the end of

THE INHERITORS

a dinner. I followed her out of the room, in
obedience to some minute signal.

We were on the best of terms — ^we two. She
mothered me, as she mothered everybody not
beneath contempt or above a certain age. I liked
her immensely — the masterful, absorbed, brown
lady. As she walked up the stairs, she said, in
half apology for withdrawing me.

" They've got things to talk about.'*

" Why, yes," I answered; " I suppose the rail-
way matter has to be settled." She looked at
me fixedly.

You — ^you mustn't talk," she warned.
Oh," I answered, " I'm not indiscreet — ^not
essentially."

The other three were somewhat tardy in mak*
ing their drawing-room appearance. I had a
sense of them, leaning their heads together over
the ed^es of the table. In the interim a rather
fierce political dowager convoyed two well-con-
trolled, blond daughters into the room. There
was a continual coming and going of such people
in the house; they did with Miss Churchill social
business of some kind, arranged electoral rar6e-
shows, and what not; troubled me very little.

[124]

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CHAPTER EIGHT

On this occasion the blond daughters were types
of the sixties' survivals — the type that unemo-
tionally inspected albums. I was convoying them
through a volume of views of Switzerland, the
dowager was saying to Miss Churchill :

" You think, then, it will be enough if we have
. . . *' When the door opened behind my
back, I looked round negligently and hastily
returned to the consideration of a shining photo-
graph of the Dent du Midi. A very gracious
figiu'e of a girl was embracing the grim Miss
Churchill, as a gracious girl should virginally
salute a grim veteran.

" Ah, my dear Miss Churchill! " a fluting voice
filled the large room, " we were very nearly going
back to Paris without once coming to see you.
We are only over for two days — for the Tenants*
Ball, and so my aunt . • . but surely that
is Arthur. • • . "

I turned eagerly. It was the Dimensionist
girl. She continued talking to Miss Churchill.
" We meet so seldom, and we are never upon
terms," she said lightly. " I assure you we are
like cat and dog." She came toward me and
the blond maidens disappeared, everybody, every-

[ 125 ]

THE INHERITORS

thing disappeared. I had not seen her for nearly
a year. I had vaguely gathered from Miss
Churchill that she was regarded as' a sister of
mine, that she had, with wealth inherited from
a semi-fabulous Australian uncle, revived the
glories of my aunt's house. I had never denied
it, because I did not want to interfere with my
aunt's attempts to regain some of the family's
prosperity. It even had my sympathy to a small
extent, for, after all, the family was my family
too.

As a memory my pseudo-sister had been some-
thing bright and clear-cut and rather small ; seen
now, she was something that one could not look
at for glow. She moved toward me, smiling and
radiant, as a ship moves beneath towers of shin-
ing canvas. I was simply overwhelmed. I don't
know what she said, what I said, what she did
or I. I have an idea that we conversed for some
minutes. I remember that she said, at some
point,

"Go away now; I want to talk to Mr. Gur-
nard."

As a matter of fact, Gurnard was making
toward her — a deliberate, slow progress. She

[126]

CHAPTER EIGHT

greeted him with nonchalance, as, beneath eyes,
a woman greets a man she knows intimately. I
found myself hating him, thinking that he was
not the sort of man she ought to know.

"It's settled?*' she asked him, as he came
within range. He looked at me inquiringly- — ^in-
solently. She said, " My brother,'* and he an-
swered:

" Oh, yes," as I moved away. I hated the
man and I could not keep my eyes off him and
her. I went and stood against the mantel-piece.
The Due de Mersch bore down upon them, and
I welcomed his interruption until I saw that he,
too, was intimate with her, intimate with a pom-
posity of flourishes as irritating as Gurnard's
nonchalance.

I stood there and glowered at them. I noted
her excessive beauty; her almost perilous self-
possession while she stood talking to those two
men. Of me there was nothing left but the
eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the
three figures go through the attitudes of con-
versation — she very animated, de Mersch gro-
tesquely empresse, Gurnard undisguisedly satur-
nine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar

[127]

THE INHERITORS

men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was
not that— there was something • . . some-
thing. I could not quite make out his face, I
never could. I never did, any more than I could
ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely
how Churchill could work in harness with such
a man, how he could bring himself to be closeted,
as he had just been, with him and with a fool like
de Mersch — I should have been afraid.

As for de Mersch, standing between those two,
he seemed like a country lout between confed-
erate sharpers. It struck me that she let me see,
made me see, that she and Gurnard had an un-
derstanding, made manifest to me by glances that
passed when the Due had his unobservant eyes
turned elsewhere.

I saw Churchill, in turn, move desultorily to-
ward them, drawn in, like a straw toward a lit-
tle whirlpool. I turned my back in a fury of
jealousy.

[128]

CHAPTER NINE

I HAD a pretty bad night after that, and was
not much in the mood for Fox on the mor-
row. The sight of her had dwarfed every-
thing; the thought of her disgusted me with
everything, made me out of conceit with the world
— ^with that part of the world that had becorne my
world. I wanted to get up into hers — ^and I could
not see any way. The room in which Fox sat
seemed to be hopelessly off the road — to be hope-
lessly off any road to any place; to be the end of
a blind alley. One day I might hope to occupy
such a room — in my shirt-sleeves, like Fox. But
that was not the end of my career — ^not the en3
that I desired. She had upset me.

" YouVe just missed Polehampton," Fox said;
" wanted to get hold of your ' Atmospheres.' **

" Oh, damn Polehampton/* I said, " and par-
ticularly damn the ' Atmospheres.* "

" Willingly," Fox said, " but I told Mr. P. that
you were willing if . . ."

[129]

THE INHERITORS

" I don't want to know," I repeated. " I tell
you Fm sick of the things."

" What a change," he asserted, sympathetically,
" I thought you would."

It struck me as disgusting that a person like
Fox should think about me at all. " Oh, I'll see
it through," I said. '' Who's the next? "

" We've got to have the Due de Mersch now,"
he answered, " De Mersch as State Founder —
written as large as you can — ^all across the page.
The moment's come and we've got to rope it in,
that's all. I've been middling good to you . . • •
You understand . . ."

He began to explain in his dark sentences. The
time had come for an energetically engineered
boom in de Mersch — ^a boom all along the line.
And I was to commence the campaign. Fox
had been good to me and I was to repay him. I
listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.

" Oh, very well," I said. I was subconsciously
aware that, as far as I was concerned, the deter-
mining factor of the situation was the announce-
ment that de Mersch was to be in Paris. If he
had been in his own particular grand duchy I
wouldn't have gone after him. For a moment

[130]

CHAPTER NINE

I thought of the interview as taking place in
London. But Fox — ostensibly, at least — ^wasn't
even aware of de Mersch's visit; spoke of him
as being in Paris — in a flat in which he was ac-
customed to interview the continental financiers
who took up so much of his time.

I realised that I wanted to go to Paris be-
cause she was there. She had said that she was
going to Paris on the morrow of yesterday.
The name was pleasant to me^ and it turned
the scale.

Fox's eyes remained upon my face.

" Do you good, eh? " he dimly interpreted my
thoughts. " A run over. I thought you'd like
it and, look here, Polehampton's taken over the
Bi'MantMy; w3Lnts to get new blood into it, see?
He'd take something. I've been talking to him
— a short series. . . . ' Aspects.'^ That sort
of thing." I tried to work myself into some sort
of enthusiasm of gratitude. I knew that Fox had
spoken well of me to Polehampton — as a sort of
set off.

" You go and see Mr. P.," he confirmed; " it's
really all arranged. And then get off to Paris as
fast as you can and have a good time,"

[131I

THE INHERITORS

"Have I been unusually cranky lately?** I
asked.

" Oh, you've been a little off the hooks, I
thought, for the last week or so/'

He took up a large bottle of white mucilage,
and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal. I was
touched by his solicitude for my health. It al*
ways did touch me, and I found myself unusually
broad-minded in thought as I went down the
terra-cotta front steps into the streets. For all
his frank vulgarity, for all his shirt-sleeves — I
somehow regarded that habit of his as the final
mark of the Beast — and the Louis Quinze acces-
sories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little
man.

I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him
in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves
of books selected for their glittering back decora-
tion. They gave the impression that Mr. Pole-
hampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fit-
ness and propriety of clothing their walls with the
same gilt cloth. They gave that idea, but I think
that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic
delight in the gilding. He was not a publisher
by nature. He had drifted into the trade mid

1 132 J

CHAPTER NINE

success, but beneath a polish o! acquaintance re-
tained a fine awe for a book as such. In early life
he had had such shining things on a shiny table in
a parlour. He had a similar awe for his daugh-
ter, who had been bom after his entry into the
trade, and who had the literary flavour — ^ flavour
so pronounced that he dragged her by the heels
into any conversation with us who hewed his raw
material, expecting, I suppose, to cow us. For
the greater good of this young lady he had bought
the Bi'Monthly— one of the portentous political
organs. He had, they said, ideas of forcing a
seat out of the party as a recompense.

It didn't matter much what was the nature of
my series of articles. I was to get the atmosphere
of cities as I had got those of the various indi-
viduals. I seemed to pay on those lines, and Miss
Polehampton commended me.

" My daughter likes . . . eh . . • your
touch, you know, and . . ." His terms were
decent — ^for the man, and were offered with a
flourish that indicated special benevolence and
a reference to the hundred pounds. I was at a
loss to account for his manner until he began to
stammer out an indication. Its lines were that

[133]

THE INHERITORS

I knew Fox, and I knew Churchill and the Due
de Mersch, and the Hour. " And those financial
articles • . . in the Hour . . . were they
now? . . ^ Were they . . . was the Trans-
Greenland railway actually . . . did I think
it would be worth one's while ... in fact
." and so on.

I never was any good in a situation of that sort,
never any good at all. I ought to have assumed
blank ignorance, but the man's eyes pleaded; it
seemed a tremendous matter to him. I tried to be
non-committal, and said: "Of course I haven't
any right." But I had a vague, stupid sense that
loyalty to Churchill demanded that I should
back up a man he was backing. As a matter of
fact, nothing so direct was a-gate, it couldn't
have been. It was something about shares in one
of de Mersch's other enterprises. Polehampton
was going to pick them up for nothing, and they
were going to rise when the boom in de Mersch's
began — something of the sort. And the boom
would begin as soon as the news of the agree-
ment about the railway got abroad.

I let him get it out of me in a way that makes
the thought of that bare place with its gilt book-

[134]

CHAPTER NINE

backs and its three uncomfortable office-chairs
and the ground-glass windows through which one
read the inversion of the legend " Polehampton,"
all its gloom and its rigid lines and its pallid light,
a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was
properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him
and his phantasmal daughter — ^who wanted to
make my acquaintance. It was like a command
to a state banquet given by a palace official, and
Lea would be invited to meet me. Miss Pole-
hampton did not like Lea, but he had to be asked
once a year — to encourage good feeling, I sup-
pose. The interview dribbled out on those lines.
I asked if it was one of Lea's days at the office.
It was not. I tried to put in a good word for
Lea, but it was not very effective. Polehampton
was too subject to his assistant's thorns to be
responsive to praise of him.

So I hurried out of the place. I wanted to be
out of this medium in which my ineffectiveness
threatened to proclaim itself to me. It was not a
very difficult matter. I had, in those days, rooms
in one of the political journalists' clubs — ^a vast
mausoleum of white tiles. But a man used to
pack my portmanteau very efficiently and at short

[1351

THE INHERITORS

notice. At the station one of those coincidences
that are not coincidences made me run against the
great Callan. He was rather unhappy — found it
impossible to make an already distracted porter
listen to the end of one of his sentences with two-
second waits between each word. For that rea*
son he brightened to see me — ^was delighted to
find a through-journey companion who would
take him on terms of greatness. In the railway
carriage, divested of troublesome bags that im-
parted anxiety to his small face and a stagger to
his walk, he swelled to his normal dimensions.

" So you're — going to — Paris," he meditated,
" for the Hourr

" Fm going to Paris for the Hour/' I agreed.

" Ah! *' he went on, " you're going to interview
the Elective Grand Duke ..."

"We call him the Due de Mersch," I inter-
rupted, flippantly. It was a matter of nuances.
The Elective Grand Duke was a philanthropist
and a State Founder, the Due de Mersch was the
hero as financier.

" Of Holstein-Launewitz," Callan ignored.
The titles slipped over his tongue like the last
drops of some inestimable oily vintage.

[136]

CHAPTER NINE

" I might have saved you the trouble. I'm go-
ing to see him myself."

" YoUy^ I italicised. It struck me as phe-
nomenal and rather absurd that everybody that I
came across should, in some way or other, be
mixed up with this portentous philanthropist. It
was as if a fisherman were drawing in a ground
line baited with hundreds of hooks. He had a lit-
tle offended air.

" He, or, I should say, a number of people in-
terested in a philanthropic society, have asked me
to go to Greenland."

" Do they want to get rid of you? " I asked,
flippantly. I was made to know my place.

^* My dear fellow," Callan said, in his most de-
liberate, most Olympian tone. " I believe you're
entirely mistaken, I believe • . . I've been
informed that the Systeme Grotolandais is one of
the healthiest places in the Polar regions. There
arc interested persons who . . ."

" So I've heard," I interrupted, " but I can as-
sure you I've heard nothing but good of the
Systeme and the . . . and its philanthropists.
•I meant nothing against them. I was only aston-
ished that you should go to such a place/'

THE INHERITORS

'* I have been asked to go upon a mission/' he
explained, seriously, " to ascertain what the truth
about the Systeme really is. It is a new country
with, I am assured, a great future in store. A
great deal of English money has been invested in
its securities, and naturally great interest is taken
in its affairs."

*' So it seems,*' I said, " I seem to run upon it
at every hour of the day and night"

" Ah, yes," Callan rhapsodised, " it has a great
future in store, a great future. The Duke is a true
philanthropist. He has taken infinite pains — in-
finite pains. He wished to build up a model state,
the model protectorate of the world, a place where
perfect equality shall obtain for all races, all creeds,
and all colours. You would scarcely believe how
he has worked to ensure the happiness of the
native races. He founded the great society to
protect the Esquimaux, the Society for the Re-
generation of the Arctic Regions— the S. R. A. R.
--as you called it, and now he is only waiting to
accomplish his greatest project — the Trans-
Greenland railway. When that is done, he will
hand over the Systeme to his own people. That
is the act of a great man."

[138I

CHAPTER NINE

" Ah, yes," I said.

"Well," Callan began again, but suddenly
paused. " By-the-bye, this must go no farther,"
he said, anxiously, " I will let you have full par-
ticulars when the time is ripe."

" My dear Callan," I said, touchily, " I can hold
my tongue."

He went off at tangent.

" I don't want you to take my word — I haven't
seen it yet. But I feel assured about it myself.
The most distinguished people have spoken to me
in its favour. The celebrated traveller, Aston,
spoke of it with tears in his eyes. He was the first
governor-general, you know. Of course I should
not take any interest in it, if I were not satisfied
as to that. It is percisely because I feel that the
thing is one of the finest monuments of a grand
century that I am going to lend it the weight of
nay pen."

" I quite understand," I assured him; then, so-
licitously, " I hope they don't expect you to do
it for nothing."

" Oh, dear, no," Callan answered.

" Ah, well, I wish you luck," I said. " They
couldn't have got a better man to win over the

[139]

THE INHERITORS

National conscience. I suppose it comes to
that/'

Callan nodded.

" I fancy I have the ear of the public/* he said.
He seemed to get satisfaction from the thought.

The train entered Folkestone Harbour. The
smell of the sea and the easy send of the boat put
a little heart into me, but my spirits were on the
down grade. Callan was a trying companion.
The sight of him stirred uneasy emotions, the
sound of his voice jarred.

" Are you coming to the Grand? " he said, as
we passed St. Denis.

" My God, no," I answered, hotly, " I'm going
across the river/*

" Ah," he murmured, " the Quartier Latin. I
wish I could come with you. But IVe my repu-
tation to think of. You'd be surprised how peo-
ple get to hear of my movements. Besides, Vtn
a family man."

I was agitatedly silent. The train steamed into
the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into
a fiacre, I breathed again. I seemed to be at the
entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise,
during that drive across the night city. In Lon-

[140]

CHAPTER NINE

don one is always a passenger, in Paris one has
reached a goal. The crowds on the pavements,
under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in
the white glare of the open spaces, are at leisure
— they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.

We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of
Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark
sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the
resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and
came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door.
You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge,
how one takes one's candle, climbs up hundreds
and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slip-
shod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward
through Rembrandt's own shadows, and how
one's final sleep is sweetened by the little incon-
veniences of a strange bare room and of a strange
hard bed.

1 141]

CHAPTER TEN

BEFORE noon of the next day I was
ascending the stairs of the new house in
which the Due had his hermitage. There
was an air of secrecy in the broad publicity of the
carpeted stairs that led to his flat; a hush in the
atmosphere; in the street itself, a glorified ctd de
sac that ran into the bustling life of the Italiens.
It had the sudden sluggishness of a back-water.
One seemed to have grown suddenly deaf in the
midst of the rattle.

There was an incredible suggestion of silence
— the silence of a private detective— in the mien
of the servant who ushered me into a room. He
was the English servant of the theatre — ^the Eng-
lish servant that foreigners affect. The room had
a splendour of its own, not a cheaply vulgar splen-
dour, but the vulgarity of the most lavish plush
and purple kind. The air was heavy, killed by the
scent of exotic flowers, darkened by curtains that
suggested the voluminous velvet backgrounds
of certain old portraits. The Due de Mersch had

[142]

CHAPTER TEN

carried with him into this place of retirement the
taste of the New Palace, that show-place of his
that was the stupefaction of swarms of honest
tourists.

I remembered soon enough that the man was
a philanthropist, that he might be an excellent
man of heart and indifferent of taste. He must
be. But I was prone to be influenced by things
of this sort, and felt depressed at the thought
that so much of royal excellence should weigh
so heavily in the wrong scale of the balance of
the applied arts. I turned my back on the room
and gazed at the blazing white decorations of the
opposite house-fronts.

A door behind me must have opened, for I
heard the sounds of a concluding tirade in a high-
pitched voice.

" Et quant a tin due de farce, je ne m'en fiche
pas mal, nioi/' it said in an accent curiously com-
pounded of the foreign and the coulisse. A mut-
tered male remonstrance ensued, and then, with
disconcerting clearness:

" Gr-r-rangeur — Eschingan — eh bien — il en-
tend. Et moi, fentends, moi aussi. Tu veux
me jouer centre, elle. La Grangeur — pah! Can-

1 143]

THE INHERITORS

soles'toi avec elle, mon vieux. Je ne veux plus
de tot. Tu nCas donni de tes sales rentes Groen-
tandoises, et je tCai pas pu les vendre. Ah, vieux
farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire."

A glorious creature — a really glorious creature
*— -came out of an adjoining room. She was as
frail, as swaying as a garden lily. Her great blue
eyes turned irefuUy upon me, her bowed lips
parted, her nostrils quivered.

'' Et quant d vous, M. Grangeur Eschingan,''
she began, ";V vais vous donner mon idee d

tnoi

I did not understand the situation in the least,
but I appreciated the awkwardness of it. The
world seemed to be standing on its head. I was
overcome; but I felt for the person in the next
room. I did not know what to do. Suddenly I
found myself saying:

** I am extremely sorry, madam, but I don't
understand French." An expression of more in-
tense vexation passed into her face — ^her beautiful
face. I fancy she wished — wished intensely — to
give me the benefit of her " idie d elle*^ She made
a quick, violent gesture of disgusted contempt,
and turned toward the half-open door from which

[144]

CHAPTER TEN

she had come. She began again to dilate upon
the little weaknesses of the person behind, when
silently and swiftly it closed. We heard the lock
click. With extraordinary quickness she had
her mouth at the keyhole: '' Peeg, peeg," she
enunciated. Then she stood to her full height,
her face became calm, her manner stately. She
glided half way across the room, paused, looked
at me, and pointed toward the unmoving door.

" Peegf peeg" she explained, mysteriously. I
think she was warning me against the wiles of the
person behind the door. I gazed into her great
eyes. " I understand," I said, gravely. She
glided from the room. For me the incident sup-
plied a welcome touch of comedy. I had leisure
for thought. The door remained closed. It
made the Due a more real person for me. I had
regarded him as a rather tiresome person in
whom a pompous philanthropism took the place
of human feelings. It amused me to be called Le
Grangeur. It amused me, and I stood in need
of amusement. Without it I might never have
written the article on the Due. I had started out
that morning in a state of nervous irritation. I
had wanted more than ever to have done with

[1451

THE INHERITORS

t the thing, with the Hour, with journalism, with
everything. But this little new experience
buoyed me up, set my mind working in less mor-
bid lines. I began to wonder whether de Mersch
would funk, or whether he would take my non-
comprehension of the woman's tirades as a thing
assured.

The door at which I had entered, by which she
had left, opened.

He must have impressed me in some way or
other that evening at the Churchills. He seemed
a very stereotyped image in my memory. He
spoke just as he had spoken, moved his hands just
as I expected him to move them. He called for
no modification of my views of his person. As a
rule one classes a man so-and-so at first meetings
modifies the classification at each subsequent one>
and so on. He seemed to be all affability, of an
adipose turn. He had the air of the man of the
world among men of the world; but none of the
unconscious reserve of manner that one expects
to find in the temporarily great. He had in its
place a kind of sub-sulkiness, as if he regretted
the pedestal from which he had descended.

In his slow commercial English he apologised

[146]

CHAPTER TEN

for having kept me waiting; he had been taking
the air of this fine morning, he said. He mum-
bled the words with his eyes on my waistcoat, with
an air that accorded rather ill with the semblance
of portentous probity that his beard conferred on
him. But he set an eye-glass in his left eye im-
mediately afterward, and looked straight, at me
as if in challenge. With a smiling " Don't men-
tion,'* I tried to demonstrate that I met him half
way.

You want to interview me," he said, blandly.
I am only too pleased. I suppose it is about
my Arctic schemes that you wish to know. I
will do what I can to inform you. You perhaps
remember what I said when I had the pleasure of
meeting you at the house of the Right Honour-
able Mr. Churchill. It has been the dream of my
life to leave behind me a happy and contented
State — ^as much as laws and organisation can
make one. This is what I should most like the
English to know of me." He was a dull talker.
I supposed that philanthropists and state founders
kept their best faculties for their higher pursuits.
I imagined the low, receding forehead and the
pink-nailed, fleshy hands to belong to a new

[147]

THE INHERITORS

Solon, a latter-day -Sneas. I tried to work my-
self into the properly enthusiastic frame of mind.
After all, it was a great work that he had under-
taken. I was too much given to dwell upon in-
tellectual gifts. These the Due seemed to lack.
I credited him with having let them be merged
in his one noble idea.

He furnished me with statistics. They had laid
down so many miles of railways, used so many
engines of British construction. They had
taught the natives to use and to value sewing-
machines and European costumes. So many
hundred of English younger sons had gone to
make their fortunes and, incidentally, to enlighten
the Esquimaux — ^so many hundreds of French,
of Germans, Greeks, Russians. All these lived
and moved in harmony, employed, happy, free la-
bourers, protected by the most rigid laws. Man-
eating, fetich-worship, slavery had been abolished,
stamped out. The great international society for
the preservation of Polar freedom watched over
dll> suggested new laws, modified the old. The
country was unhealthy, but not to men of dean
lives — hominibus bona voluntc^Us. It asked for
no others.

1 148 J

CHAPTER TEN

"I have had to endure much misrepresent
tation. I have been called names," the Due
said.

The figure of the lady danced before my eyes,
lithe, supple — 3, statue endued with the motion of
a serpent. I seemed to see her sculptured white
hand pointing to the closed door.

" Ah, yes," I said, " but one knows the people
that call you names."

" Well, then," he answered, " it is your task to
make them know the truth. Your nation has so
much power. If it will only realise."

" I will do my best," I said.

I saw the apotheosis of the Press — 2l Press that
makes a State Founder suppliant to a man like
myself. For he had the tone of a deprecating
petitioner. I stood between himself and a people,
the arbiter of the peoples, of the kings of the
future. I was nothing, nobody; yet here I stood
in communion with one of those who change the
face of continents. He had need of me, of the
power that was behind me. It was strange to be
alone in that room with that man — ^to be there
just as I might be in my own little room alone
with any other man.

IH9]

THE INHERITORS

I was not unduly elated, you must understand.
It was nothing to me. I was just a person elected
by some suffrage of accidents. Even in my own
eyes I was merely a symbol — ^the sign visible of
incomprehensible power.

" I will do my best/' I said.

" Ah, yes, do," he said, " Mr. Churchill told me
how nicely you can do such things."

I said that it was very kind of Mr. Churchill.
The tension of the conversation was relaxed. The
Due asked if I had yet seen my aunt.
I had forgotten her," I said.
Oh, you must see her," he said; "she is a
most remarkable lady. She is one of my relaxa-
tions. All Paris talks about her^ I can assure
you."

" I had no idea," I said.

"Oh, cultivate her," he said; "you will be
amused."

" I will," I said, a§ I took my leave.

I went straight home to my little room above
the roofs. I began at once to write my article,
working at high pressure, almost hysterically. I
remember that place and that time so well. In
moments of emotion one gazes fixedly at thingSr

[ISO]

CHAPTER TEN

hardly conscious of them. Afterward one re-
members.

I can still see the narrow room, the bare, brown,
discoloured walls, the incongruous marble clock
on the mantel-piece, the single rickety chair that
swayed beneath me. I could almost draw the
tortuous pattern of the faded cloth that hid the
round table at which I sat. The ink was thick,
pale, and sticky; the pen spluttered. I wrote
furiously, anxious to be done with it. Once I
went and leaned over the balcony, trying to hit
on a word that would not come. Miles down
below, little people crawled over the cobbled
street, little carts rattled, little workmen let down
casks into a cellar. It was all very grey, small,
and clear.

Through the open window of an opposite gar-
ret I could see a sculptor working at a colossal
clay model. In his white blouse he seemed big,
out of all proportion to the rest of the world.
Level with my eyes there were flat lead roofs
and chimneys. On one of these was scrawled,
in big, irregular, blue-painted letters: *' A has
Coignet*^

Great clouds began to loom into view over

THE INHERITORS

the house-tops, rounded, toppling masses of
grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale
limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked
at all these objects. I had come out here to
think — thoughts had deserted me. I could only
look.

The clouds moved imperceptibly, fatefuUy
onward, a streak of lightning tore them apart.
They whirled like tortured smoke and grew sud-
denly black. Large spots of rain with jagged
edges began to fall on the lead floor of my
balcony.

I turned into the twilight of my room and be-
gan to write. I can still feel the tearing of my
pen-point on the coarse paper. It was a hin-
drance to thought, but my flow of words ignored
it, gained impetus from it, as a stream does at
the breaking of a dam.

I was writing a paean to a great coloniser.
That sort of thing was in the air then. I was
drawn into it, carried away by my subject. Per-
haps I let it do so because it was so little familiar
to my lines of thought. It was fresh ground and
I revelled in it. I committed myself to that kind
of emotional, lyrical outburst that one dislikes so

[152]

CHAPTER TEN

much on re-reading. I was half conscious of the
fact, but I ignored it.

The thunderstorm was over, and there was a
moist sparkling freshness in the air when I hur-
ried with my copy to the Hour office in the
Avenue de TOpera. I wished to be rid of it, to
render impossible all chance of revision on the
morrow.

I wanted, too, to feel elated; I expected it. It
was a right. At the office I found the foreign
correspondent, a little cosmopolitan Jew whose
eyebrows began their growth on the bridge of
his nose. He was effusive and familiar, as the
rest of his kind.

" Hullo, Granger," was his greeting. I was
used to regarding myself as fallen from a high
estate, but I was not yet so humble in spirit as to
relish being called Granger by a stranger of his
stamp. I tried to freeze him politely.

"Read your stuff in the Hour,'' was bis re*
jdnder; "jolly good I call it. Been doing old
Red-Beard? Let's have a look. Yes, yes.
That's the way — that's the real thing — I call it.
Must have bored you to death . . . old
de Mersch I mean. I ought to have had the job^

1 153 1

THE INHERITORS

you know. My business, interviewing people in
Paris. But / don't mind. Much rather you did
it than I. You do it a heap better."

I murmured thanks. There was a pathos
about the sleek little man — sl pathos that is al-
ways present in the type. He seemed to be try-
ing to assume a deprecating equality.

" Where are you going to-night? " he asked,
with sudden effusiveness. I was taken aback.
One is not used to being asked these questions
after five minutes' acquaintance. I said that I
had no plans.

" Look here," he said, brightening up, " come
and have dinner with me at Brcguet's, and look
in at the Opera afterward. We'll have a real
nice chat."

I was too tired to frame an adequate excuse.
Besides, the little man was as eager as a child for
a new toy. We went to Breguet's and had a
really excellent dinner.

"Always come here," he said; "one meets a
lot of swells. It runs away with a deal of mdney
— but I don't care to do things on the cheap, not
for the Hour, you know. You can always be
certain when I say that I have a thing from a
senator that he is a senator, and not an old

1 154 1.

CHAPTER TEN

woman in a paper kiosqne. Most of them do
that sort of thing, you know."

" I always wondered/' I said, mildly.

" That's de Sourdam I nodded to as we came
in, and that old chap there is Pluyvis — ^the Af-
faire man, you know. I must have a word with
him in a minute, if you'll excuse me."

He began to ask affectionately after the health
of the excellent Fox, asked if I saw him often,
and so on and so on. I divined with amusement
that was pleasurable that the little man had his
own little axe to grind, and thought I might take
a turn at the grindstone if he managed me well.
So he nodded to de Sourdam of the Austrian em-
bassy and had his word with Pluyvis, ai^d rejoiced
to have impressed me — I could see him bubble
with happiness and purr. He proposed that we
should stroll as far as the paper kiosque that he
patronised habitually — ^it was kept by a fellow-
Israelite — ^ snuffy little old woman.

I understood that in the joy of his heart he
was for expanding, for wasting a few minutes on
a stroll.

" Haven't stretched my legs for months," he
explained*

We strolled there through the summer twi-

[ 155 1

THE INHERITORS

light. It was so pleasant to saunter through the
young summer night. There were so many lit-
tle things to catch the eyes, so many of the little
things down near the earth; expressions on faces
of the passers, the set of a collar, the quaint
foreign tightness of waist of a good bourgeoise
who walked arm in arm with her perspiring
spouse. The gilding on the statue of Joan of
Arc had a pleasant littleness of Philistinism, the
arcades of the Rue de Rivoli broke up the grey
light pleasantly too. I remembered a little shop
— a little Greek affair with a windowful of pinch-
beck — ^where I had been given a false five-franc
piece years and years ago. The same villainous
old Levantine stood in the doorway, perhaps the
fez that he wore was the same fez. The little
old woman that we strolled to was bent nearly
double. Her nose touched her wares as often as
not> her mittened hands sought quiveringly the
papers that tlfe correspondent asked for. I liked
him the better for his solicitude for this forlorn
piece of flotsam of his own race.

" Always come here," he exclaimed; " one gets
into habits. Very honest woman, too, you can
be certain of getting your change. If you're a

[156]

CHAPTER TEN

stranger you can't be sure that they won't giye
you Italian silver, you know."

" Oh, I know," I answered. I knew, too, that
he wished me to purchase something. I followed
the course of her groping hands, caught sight of
the Revise Rouge, and remembered that it con-
tained something about Greenland. I helped
myself to it, paid for it, and received my just
change. I felt that I had satisfied the little man,
and felt satisfied with myself.

" I want to see Radet's article on Greenland,"
I said.

" Oh, yes," he explained, once more exhibiting
himself in the capacity of the man who knows,
" Radet gives it to them. Rather a lark, I call
it, though you mustn't let old de Mersch know
you read him. Radet got sick of Cochin, and
tried Greenland. He's getting touched by the
Whites you know. They say that the priests
don't like the way the Systeme's playing into the
hands of the Protestants and the English Govern-
ment. So they set Radet on to write it down.
He's going in for mysticism and all that sort of
thing — ^just like all these French jokers are doing.
Got deuced thick with that lot in the F. St. Ger-

[1571

THE INHERITORS

main — some relation of yours, ain't they? Rather
a lark that lot, quite the thing just now, everyone
goes there; old de Mersch too. Have frightful
rows sometimes, such a mixed lot, you see." The
good little man rattled amiably along beside me.

" Seems quite funny to be buying books," he
said. " I haven't read a thing I've bought, not
for years."

We reached the Opera in time for the end of
the first act — it was Aida, I think. My little
friend had a free pass all over the house. I had
not been in it for years. In the old days I had
always seen the stage from a great height, cran-
ing over people's heads in a sultry twilight; now
I saw it on a level, seated at my ease. I had only
the power of the Press to thank for the change.

" Come here as often as I can," my companion
said; " can't do without music when it's to be
had." Indeed he had the love of his race (or it.
It seemed to soften him, to change his nature, as
he sat silent by my side.

But the closing notes of each scene found him
out in the cool of the corridors, talking, and be-
ing talked to by anyone that would vouchsafe
him a word.

[158]

CHAPTER TEN

*' Pick up a lot here>" he explained.

After the finale we leaned over one of the side
balconies to watch the crowd streaming down
the marble staircases. It is a scene that I never
tire of. There is something so fantastically
tawdry in the coloured marble of the architecture.
It is for all the world like a triumph of ornamental
soap work; one expects to smell the odours.
And the torrent of humanity pouring liquidly
aslant through the mirror-like light, and the
spaciousness . . . Yes, it is fantastic, some-
how; ironical, too.

I was watching the devious passage of a rather
drunken, gigantic, florid Englishman, wonder-
ing, I think, how he would reach his bed.

" That must be a relation of yours," the cor-
respondent said, pointing. My gldnce followed
the line indicated by his pale finger. I made out
the glorious beard of the Due de Mersch, on his
arm was an old lady to whom he seemed to pay
deferential attention. His head was bent on one
side; he was smiling frankly. A little behind
them, on the stairway, there was a space. Per-
haps I was mistaken; perhaps there was no space
— I don't know. I was only conscious of a figure,

[159]

THE INHERITORS

an indescribably clear-cut woman's figure, glid-
ing down the way. It had a coldness, a self-pos-
session, a motion of its own. In that clear, trans-
parent, shimmering light, every little fold of the
dress, every little shadow of the white arms, the
white shoulders, came up to me. The face turned
up to meet mine. I remember so well the light
shining down on the face, not a shadow anywhere,
not a shadow beneath the eyebrows, the nostrils,
the waves of hair. It was a vision of light,
theatening, sinister.

She smiled, her lips parted.

" You come to me to-morrow," she said. Did
I hear the words, did her lips merely form
them? She was far, far down below me; the air
was alive with the rustling of feet, of garments,
of laughter, full of sounds that made them-
selves heard, full of sounds that would not be
caught.

" You come to me . . • to-morrow."

The old lady on the Due de Mersch's arm was
obviously my aunt. I did not see why I should
not go to them to-morrow. It struck me sud-
denly and rather pleasantly that this was, after all,
my family. This old lady actually was a connec-

(i6o]

CHAPTER TEN

tion more close than anyone else in the world.
As for the girl, to all intents and, in everyone
else's eyes, she was my sister. I cannot say I dis-
liked having her for my sister, either. I stood
looking down upon them and felt less alone than
I had done for many years.

A minute scuffle of the shortest duration was
taking place beside me. There were a couple of
men at my elbow. I don't in the least know what
they were— perhaps marquises, perhaps railway
employees— one never can tell over there. One
of them was tall and blond, with a heavy, bow-
shaped red moustache — Irish in type; the other
of no particular height, excellently groomed,
dark, and exemplary. I knew he was exemplary
from some detail of costume that I can't remem-
ber — his gloves or a strip of silk down the sides
of his trousers — ^something of the sort. The
blond was saying something that I did not catch.
I heard the words " de Mersch " and " Anglaise/^
and saw the dark man turn his attention to the
little group below. Then I caught my own name
mispronounced and somewhat of a stumbling-
block to a high-pitched contemptuous intonation.
The little correspondent, who was on my other

[ i6i 1

THE INHERITORS

arm, started visibly and moved swiftly behind
my back.

" Messieurs^'* he said in an urgent whisper, and
drew them to a little distance. I saw him say
something, saw them pivot to look at me, shrug
their shoulders and walk away. I didn't in the
least grasp the significance of the scene — ^not
then.

" What's the matter? " I asked my returning
friend; " were they talking about me? " He an-
swered nervously.

" Oh, it was about your aunt's Salon, you
know. They might have been going to say
something awkward ... one never knows."

"They really do talk about it then?" I said.
"I've a good mind to attend one of their exhibi*
tions."

"Why, of course," he said, "you ought. I
really think you ought''

" ril go to-morrow," I answered.

(162]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I COULDN'T get to sleep that night, but lay
and tossed, lit my candle and read, and so on,
forever and ever — for an eternity. I was
confoundedly excited; there were a hundred
things to be thought about; clamouring to be
thought about; out-clamouring the re-current
chimes of some near clock. I began to read the
article by Radet in the Revue Rouge — the one I
had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It
upset me a good deal — ^that article. It gave away
the whole Greenland show so completely that the
ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the
Hour seemed impossible. I suppose the good
Radet had Tiis axe to grind — ^just as I had had
to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe
didn't show. I was reading about an inland val-
ley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing; immensely
broad, immensely shadowy, winding away be-
tween immense, half-invisible mountains into the
silence of an unknown country. A little band of

I163]

THE INHERITORS

men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in
those mists, crept slowly up it. A man among
them was speaking; I seemed to hear his voice,
low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light
and the silence and the vastness.

And how well it was done — how the man could
write; how skilfully he made his points. There
was no slosh about it, no sentiment. The touch
was light, in places even gay. He saw so well
the romance of that dun band that had cast re-
morse behind ; that had no return, no future, that
spread desolation desolately. This was merely a
review article — a thing that in England would
have been unreadable; the narrative of a nomad
of some genius. I could never have written like
that — I should have spoilt it somehow. It set
me tingling with desire, with the desire that
transcends the sexual; the desire for the fine
phrase, for the right word — ^for all the other in-
tangibles. And I had been wasting all this time;
had been writing my inanities. I must go away;
must get back, right back to the old road, must
work. There was so little time. It was un-
pleasant, too, to have been mixed up in this affair,
to have been trepanned into doing my best to help

[164]

I

CHAPTER ELEVEN

it on its foul way. God knows I had little of the
humanitarian in me. If people must murder in
the by-ways of an immense world, they must do
murder and pay the price. But that I should
have been mixed up in such was not what I had
wanted. I must have done with it all; with all
this sort of thing, must get back to my old self,
must get back. I seemed to hear the slow words
of the Due de Mersch.

" We have increased the exports by so much;
the innports by so much. We have protected tlic
natives, have kept their higher interests ever
present in our minds. And through it all wc
have never forgotten the mission entrusted to us
by Europe — to remove the evil of darkness from
the earth — to root out barbarism with its name-
less horrors, whose existence has been a blot on
our consciences. Men of good-will and self-
sacrifice are doing it now — are laying down
their priceless lives to root out ... to root
out . . ."

Of course they were rooting them out.

It didn't very much matter to me. One sup-
poses that that sort of native exists for that sort
of thing — to be rooted out by men of good-will,

[1651

THE INHERITORS

with careers to make. The point was that that
was what they were really doing out there — ^root-
ing out the barbarians as well as the barbarism,
and proving themselves worthy of their hire. And
I had been writing them up and was no better
than the farcical governor of a department who
would write on the morrow to protest that that
was what they did not do. You see I had a sort
of personal pride in those days ; and preferred to
think of myself as a decent person. I knew that
people would say the same sort of thing about
me that they said about all the rest of them. I
couldn't very well protest. I had been scratch-
ing the backs of all sorts of creatures; out of
friendship, out of love — for all sorts of reasons.
This was only a sort of last straw — or perhaps it
was the sight of her that had been the last straw.
It seemed naively futile to have been wasting my
time over Mrs. Hartly and those she stood for,
when there was something so different in the
world — something so like a current of east wind.
That vein of thought kept me awake, and a
worse came to keep it company. The men from
the next room came home — students, I suppose.
They talked gaily enough, their remarks inter-

[i66]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

spersed by the thuds of falling boots and the other
incomprehensible noises of the night. Through
the flimsy partition I caught half sentences in
that sort of French intonation that is so impos-
sible to attain. It reminded me of the voices of
the two men at the Opera. I began to wonder
what they had been saying — what they could
have been saying that concerned me and affected
the little correspondent to interfere. Suddenly
the thing dawned upon me with the startling
clearness of a figure in a complicated pattern — ^a
clearness from which one cannot take one's eyes.
It threw everything — ^the whole world — into
more unpleasant relations with me than even the
Greenland affair. They had not been talking
about my aunt and her Salon, but about my
. . . my sister. She was de Mersch's "^n-
glaise" I did not believe it, but probably all
Paris — ^the whole world — said she was. And to
the whole world I was her brother ! Those two
men who had looked at me: over their shoulders
had shrugged and said, " Oh, he*s . . ." And
the whole world wherever I went would whisper
in asides, *' Don't you know Granger? He's the
brother. De Mersch employs him/'

[167]

THE INHERITORS

I began to understand everything; the woman
in de Mersch's room with her " Eschingan-Gran-
geur-r-r"; the deference of the little Jew — the
man who knew. He knew that I — that I, who
patronised him, was a person to stand well with
because of my — my sister's hold over de Mersch.
I wasn't, of course, but you can't understand how
the whole thing maddened me all the same. I
hated the world — this world of people who whis-
pered and were whispered to, of men who knew
and men who wanted to know — the shadowy
world of people who didn't matter, but whose eyes
and voices were all round one and did somehow
matter. I knew well enough how it had come
about. It was de Mersch — ^the State Founder,
with his shamed face and his pallid hands. She
had been attracted by his* air of greatness, by his
elective grand-dukedom, by his protestations.
Women are like that. She had been attracted
and didn't know what she was doing, didn't know
what the world was over here — how people talked.
She had been excited by the whirl and flutter of
it, and perhaps she didn't care. The thing must
come to an end, however. She had said that I
should go to her on the morrow. Well, I would

[168]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

go, and I would put a stop to this. I had sud-
denly discovered how very much I was a Granger
of Etchingham, after all I had family traditions
and graves behind me. And for the sake of all
these people whose one achievement had been the
making of a good name I had to intervene now.
After all — *' Bon sang w^" — does not get itself
talked about in that way.

The early afternoon of the morrow found me
in a great room — a faded, sombre salon of the
house my aunt had taken in the Faubourg Saint
Germain. Niunbers of strong-featured people
were talking in groups among the tables and
chairs of a time before the Revolution. I rather
forget how I had got there, and what had gone
before. I must have arisen late and passed the
intervening hours in a state of trepidation. I was
going to see her, and I was like a cub in love, with
a man's place to fill. It was a preposterous state
of things that set the solid world in a whirl.
Once there, my eyes suddenly took in things.

I had a sense of her standing by my side. She
had just introduced me to my aunt — d. heavy-
featured, tired-eyed village tyrant. She was so
obviously worn out, so obviously ** not what she

1 169]

THE INHERITORS

had been/' that her face would have been pitiful
but for its immovable expression of class pride.
The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so
absolutely at the top of their own particular kind
of tree that it was impossible for them to meet
anyone who was not an inferior. A man might
be a cabinet minister, might even be a prince,
but he couldn't be a Granger of Etchingham,
couldn't have such an assortment of graves, each
containing a Granger, behind his back. The ex-
pression didn't even lift for me who had. It
couldn't, it was fixed there. One wondered
what she was doing in this gaUre. It seemed
impossible that she should interest herself in the
restoration of the Bourbons — ^they were all very
well, but they weren't even English, let alone a
county family. I figured it out that she must
have set her own village so much in order that
there remained nothing but the setting in order
of the rest of the world. Her bored eyes wan-
dered sleepily over the assemblage. They seemed
to have no preferences for any of them. They
rested on the vacuously Bonaparte prince, on the
moribund German Jesuit to whom he was listen-
ing, on the darkly supple young Spanish priest,

[170I

CHAPTER ELEVEN

on the rosy-gilled English Passionist, on Radet,
the writer of that article in the Revue Rouge,
who was talking to a compatriot in one of the
tall windows. She seemed to accept the satur-
nine-looking men, the political women, who all
spoke a language not their own, with an accent
and a fluency, and a dangerous far-away smile
and a display of questionable teeth all their own.
She seemed to class the political with the pious,
the obvious adventurer with the seeming fanatic.
It was amazing to me to see her there, standing
with her county family self-possession in the
midst of so much that was questionable. She
offered me no explanation; I had to find one for
myself.

We stood and talked in the centre of the room.
It did not seem a place in which one could sit.

" Why have you never been to see me? " she
asked languidly. " I might never have known
of your existence if it had not been for your sis-
ter." My sister was standing at my side, you
must remember. I don't suppose that I started,
but I made my aunt no answer.

" Indeed," she went on, " I should never have
known that you had a sister. Your father was

[171]

THE INHERITORS

80 very peculiar. From the day he married, my
husband never heard a word from him."

"They were so very different," I said, list-
lessly.

" Ah, yes," she answered, " brothers so often
are." She sighed, apropos of nothing. She con-
tinued to utter disjointed sentences from which
I gathered a skeleton history of my soi distant
sister's introduction of herself and of her preten-
sions. She had, it seemed, casually introduced
herself at some garden-party or function of the
sort, had represented herself as a sister of my own
to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fort-
une. She herself had suggested her being shelt-
ered under my aunt's roof as a singularly wel-
come " paying guest." She herself, too, had sug-
gested the visit to Paris and had hired the house
from a degenerate Due de Luynes who preferred
the delights of an appartetnent in the less lugu-
brious Avenue Marceau.

" We have tastes so much in common," my
aunt explained, as she moved away to welcome
a new arrival. I was left alone with the woman
who called herself my sister.

We stood a little apart. ' Each little group of

[172]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

talkers in the vast room seemed to stand just with-
out earshot of the next. I had my back to the
door, my face to her.

" And so you have come," she said, maliciously
it seemed to me.

It was impossible to speak in such a position;
in such a place; impossible to hold a discussion
on family affairs when a diminutive Irishwoman
with too mobile eyebrows, and a couple of gigan-
tic, raw-boned, lugubrious Spaniards, were in a
position to hear anything that one uttered above
a whisper. One might want to raise one's voice.
Besides, she was so — so terrible; there was no
knowing what she might not say. She so obvi-
ously did not care what the Irish or the Spaniards
or the Jesuits heard or thought, that I was forced
to the mortifying conclusion that I did.

" Oh, I've come," I answered. I felt as out-
rageously out of it as one does at a suburban hop
where one does not know one animal of the
menagerie. I did not know what to do or what
to say, or what to do with my hands. I was per-
vaded by the unpleasant idea that all those
furtive eyes were upon me; gauging me because
I was the brother of a personality. I was con-

[173]

THE INHERITORS

cemed about the fit of my coat and my boots, and
all the while I was in a furious temper; my errand
was important.

She stood looking at me, a sinuous, brilliant
thing, with a light in the eyes half challenging,
half openly victorious.

" You have come," she said, " and . . . "

1 became singularly afraid of her; and wanted
to stop her mouth. She might be going to say
an)rthing. She overpowered me so that I actu-
ally dwindled — ^into the gawkiness of extreme
youth. I became a goggle-eyed, splay-footed
boy again and made a boy's desperate effort after
a recovery at one stroke of an ideal standard of
dignity.

*' I must have a word with you," I said, remem-
bering. She made a little gesture with her
hands, signifying " I am here." " But in pri-
vate," I added.

" Oh, everything's in private here," she said.
I was silent.

" I must," I added after a time.

" I can't retire with you," she said; " ' it would
look odd,' you'd say, wouldn't you? I shrugged
my shoulders in intense irritation. I didn't want

[174]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

to be burlesqued. A flood of fresh people came
into the room. I heard a throaty " ahem " be-
hind me. The Due de Mersch was introducing
himself to notice. It was as I had thought —
the man was an habitue, with his well-cut clothes,
his air of protestation, and his tremendous golden
poll. He was the only sunlight that the gloomy
place rejoiced in. He bowed low over my op-
pressor's hand, smiled upon me, and began to
utter platitudes in English.

" Oh, you may speak French," she said care-
lessly.

" But your brother . . ." he answered.

" I understand French very well," I said. I
was in no mood to spare him embarrassments;
wanted to show him that I had a hold over him,
and knew he wasn't the proper person to talk to a
young lady. He glared at me haughtily.

" But yesterday . . ." he began in a tone
that burlesqued august displeasure. I was won-
dering what he had looked like on the other side
of the door — whilst that lady had been explain-
ing his nature to me.

" Yesterday I wished to avoid embarrass-
ments," I said; " I was to represent your views

£i7Sl

THE INHERITORS

about Greenland. I might have misunderstood
you in some important matter."

" I see, I see," he said conciliatorily. " Yes-
terday we spoke English for the benefit of the
British public. When we speak French we are
not in public, I hope." He had a semi-supplicat-
ing manner.

" Everything's rather too much in public
here," I answered. My part as I imagined it was
that of a British brother defending his sister from
questionable attentions — the person who " tries
to show the man he isn't wanted." But de
Mersch didn't see the matter in that light at all.
He could not, of course. He was as much used
to being purred to as my aunt to looking down on
non-county persons. He seemed to think I was
making an incomprehensible insular joke, and
laughed non-committally. It wouldn't have been
possible to let him know he wasn't wanted.

" Oh, you needn't be afraid of my brother,'*
she said suddenly. " He is quite harmless. He
is even going to give up writing for the papers
except when we want him."

The Due turned from me to her, smiled and
bowed. His smile was inane, but he bowed very

[176]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

well; he had been groomed intc that sort of thing
or had it in the blood.

" We work together still? " he asked.

" Why not? " she answered.

A hubbub of angry voices raised itself behind
my back. It was one of the contretemps that
made the Salon Grangeur famous throughout the
city.

" You forced yourself upon me. Did I say
anywhere that you were responsible? If it re-
sembles your particular hell upon earthy what is
that to me? You do worse things; you, your-
self, monsieur. Haven't I seen . . . haven't
I seen it? "

The Due de Mersch looked swiftly over his
shoulder toward the window.

" They seem to be angry there," he said ner-
vously. " Had not something better be done,
Miss Granger? "

Miss Granger followed the direction of his
eyes.

" Why," she said, " we're used to these differ-
ences of opinion. Besides, it's only Monsieur
Radet; he's forever at war with someone or
other."

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THE INHERITORS

" He ought to be shown the door/* the Due
grumbled.

" Oh, as for that," she answered, " we couldn't.
My aunt would be desolated by such a necessity.
He is very influential in certain quarters. My
aunt wants to catch him for the — He's going
to write an article."

" He writes too many articles," the Due said,
with heavy displeasure.

"Oh, he has written one too many," she an-
swered, " but that can be traversed . . ."

"But no one believes," the Due objected
. . . Radet's voice intermittently broke in
upon his soHo voce, coming to our ears in gusts.

"Haven't I seen you . . . and then
. • . and you offer me the cross ... to
bribe me to silence . . . me . . ."

In the general turning of faces toward the win-
dow in which stood Radet and the other, mine
turned too. Radet was a cadaverous, weather-
worn, passion-worn individual, badger-grey, and
worked up into a grotesquely attitudinised fury
of injured self-esteem. The other was a dena-
tionalised, shifty-eyed, sallow, grey-bearded gov-
ernor of one of the provinces of the Systeme

[178]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Groenlandais; had a closely barbered head, a bull
neck, and a great belly. He cast furtive glances
round him, uncertain whether to escape or to
wait for his say. He looked at the ring that en-
circled the window at a little distance, and his
face, which had betrayed a half-apparent shame,
hardened at sight of the cynical masks of the cos-
mopolitan conspirators. They were amused by
the scene. The Holsteiner gained confidence,
shrugged his shoulders.

" You have had the fever very badly since you
came back," he 3aid, showing a level row of
white teeth. " You did not talk like that out
there."

" No— •/^(w si bete — ^you would have hanged
me, perhaps, as you did that poor devil of a Swiss.
What was his name? Now you offer me the
cross. Because I had the fever, heinf "

I had been watching the Duc*s face; a first
red flush had come creeping from under the roots
of his beard, and had spread over the low fore-
head and the sides of the neck. The eyeglass
fell from the eye, a signal for the colour to re-
treat. The full lips grew pallid, and began to
mutter unspoken words. His eyes wandered ap-

THE INHERITORS

pealingly from the woman beside him to me. /
didn't want to look him in the face. The man
was a trafficker in human blood, an evil liver, and
I hated him. He had to pay his price; would
have to pay — ^but I didn't want to see him pay it.
There was a limit.

I began to excuse myself, and slid out between
the groups of excellent plotters. As I was go-
ing, she said to me :

"You may come to me to-morrow in the
morning."

IiSoJ

CHAPTER TWELVE

m

I WAS at the Hotel de Luynes— or Granger
—early on the following morning. The
mists were still hanging about the dismal
upper windows of the inscrutable Faubourg; the
toilet of the city was being completed ; the little
hoses on wheels were clattering about the quiet
larger streets. I had not much courage thus
early in the day. I had started impulsively; step-
ping with the impulse of immediate action from
the doorstep of the dairy where I had break-
fasted. But I made detours; it was too early,
and my pace slackened into a saunter as I passed
the row of porters' lodges in that dead, inscrut-
able street. I wanted to fly; had that impulse
very strongly; but I burnt my boats with my
inquiry of the incredibly ancient, one-eyed por-
teress. I made my way across the damp court-
yard, under the enormous portico, and into the
chilly stone hall that no amount of human com-
ing and going sufficed to bring back to a sem-

[i8i]

THE INHERITORS

blance of life. Mademoiselle was expecting me.
One went up a great flight of stone steps into
one of the immensely high, narrow, impossibly
rectangular ante-rooms that one sees in the
frontispieces of old plays. The furniture looked
no more than knee-high until one discovered that
one's self had no appreciable stature. The sad
light slanted in ruled lines from the great height
of the windows; an army of motes moved slowly
in and out of the shadows. I went after awhile
and looked disconsolately out into the court-yard.
The porteress wsls making her way across the
gravelled space, her arms, her hands, the pockets
of her black apron full of letters of all sizes. I
remembered that the facteur had followed me
down the street. A noise of voices came con-
fusedly to my cars from between half-opened fold-
ing-doors; the thing reminded me of my waiting
in de Mersch's rooms. It did not last so long.
The voices gathered tone, as they do at the end
of a colloquy, succeeded each other at longer in-
tervals, and at last came to a sustained halt. The
tall doors moved ajar and she entered, followed
by a man whom I recognized as the governor of
a province of the day before. In that hostile

[i82[

CHAPTER TWELVE

light he looked old and weazened and worried;^
seemed to have lost much of his rotundity. As
for her, she shone with a light of her own.

He greeted me dejectedly, and did not bright-
en when she let him know that we had a mutual
friend in Callan. The Governor, it seemed, in
his capacity of Supervisor of the Systeme, was to
conduct that distinguished person through the
wilds of Greenland; was to smooth his way and
to point out to him excellences of administration.

I wished him a good journey; he sighed and
began to fumble with his hat.

'' AlorSy c'est entendu/' she said; giving him
leave to depart. He looked at her in an odd sort
of way, took her hand and applied it to his lips.

" Cest entendu,'* he said with a heavy sigh,
drops of moisture spattering from beneath his
white moustache, " mais . . ."

He ogled again with infinitesimal eyes and
went out of the room. He had the air of wish-
ing to wipe the perspiration from his brows and
to exclaim, " Quelle femmel " But if he had
any such wish he mastered it until the door hid
him from sight.

" Why the . • ."I began before it had well

[183I

THE INHERITORS

dosed, " do you allow that thing to make love
to you? *' I wanted to take up my position be-
fore she could have a chance to make me ridicu-
lous. I wanted to make a long speech — ^about
duty to the name of Granger. But the next word
hung, and, before it came, she had answered:

" He? — Oh, I'm making use of him."

"To inherit the earth?" I asked ironically,
and she answered gravely :

" To inherit the earth."

She was leaning against the window, playing
with the strings of the blinds, and silhouetted
against the leaden light. She seemed to be,
physically, a little tired ; and the lines of her figure
to interlace almost tenderly — to " compose "
well, after the ideas of a certain school. I knew
so Uttle of her — only just enough to be in love
with her — ^that this struck me as the herald of a
new phase, not so much in her attitude to me as
in mine to her; she had even then a sort of grav-
ity, the gravity of a person on whom things were
beginning to weigh.

" But," I said, irresolutely. I could not speak
to her; to this new conception of her, in the way
I had planned; in the way one would talk to a

I184I

CHAPTER TWELVE

brilliant, limpid — oh, to a woman of sorts. But
I had to take something of my old line. " How
would flirting with that man help you? "

" It's quite simple," she answered, " he*s to
show Callan all Greenland, and Callan is to
write . . . Callan has immense influence
over a great class, and he will have some of the
prestige of — of a Commissioner."

Oh, I know about Callan," I said.

And," she went on, " this man had orders
to hide things from Callan ; you know what it is
they have to hide. But he won't now; that is
what I was arranging. It's partly by bribery and
partly because he has a belief in his beaux yeux —
so Callan will' be upset and will write an . • .
exposure; the sort of thing Callan would write if
he were well upset. And he will be, by what this
man will let him see. You know what a little
man like Callan will feel ... he will be made
ill. He would faint at the sight of a drop of
blood, you know, and he will see— oh, the very
worst, worse than what Radet saw. And he will
write a frightful article, and it will be a thunder-
clap for de Mersch . . . And de Mersch will
be getting very shaky by then. And your friend

THE INHERITORS

Churchill will try to carry de Mersch^s railway
bill through in the face of the scandal. Church-
ill's motives will be excellent, but everyone will
say . . . You know what people say . . .
That is what I and Gurnard want. We want
people to talk; we want them to believe . . ."
I don't know whether there really was a hesi-
tation in her voice, or whether I read that into
it. She stood there, playing with the knots of
the window-cords and speaking in a low mono-
tone. The whole thing, the sad twilight of the
place, her tone of voice, seemed tinged with un-
availing regret. I had almost forgotten the Di-
mensionist story, and I had never believed in it.
But now, for the first time I began to have my
doubts. I was certain that she had been plotting
something with one of the Due de Mersch's lieu-
tenants. The man's manner vouched for that;
he bad not been able to look me in the face. But,
more than anything, his voice and manner made
mc feel that we had passed out of a realm of farci-
cal allegory. I knew enough to see that she might
be speaking the truth. And, if she were, her
calm avowal of such treachery proved that she
tHHis what she had said the Dimensionists were;

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CHAPTER TWELVE

cold, with no scruples, clear-sighted and admira-
bly courageous, and indubitably enemies of so-
ciety.

"I don't understand," I said. "But de
Mersch then?"

^ She made a little gesture ; one of those move-
ments that I best remember of her; the smallest,
the least noticeable. It reduced de Mersch to
nothing; he no longer even counted.

" Oh, as for him," she said, " he is only a
detail." I had still the idea that she spoke with
a pitying intonation — ^as if she were speaking to
a dog in pain. " He doesn't really count; not
really. He will crumble up and disappear, very
soon. Yotli won't even remember him."

" But," I said, " you go about with him, as if
you . . . You are getting yourself talked
about . . . Everyone thinks — ^" . . . The
accusation that I had come to make seemed im-
possible, now I was facing her. ** I believe," I
added, with the suddenness of inspiration. " I'm
certain even, that he thinks that you . . ."

" Well, they think that sort of thing. But it
is only part of the game. Oh, I assure you it is
no more than that."

[1871

THE INHERITORS

I was silent. I felt that, for one reason or an*
otheri she wished me to believe.

" Yes," she said, " I want you to believe. It
will save you a good deal of pain."

** If you wanted to save me pain/' I maintained,
" you would have done with de Mersch . . •
for good." I had an idea that the solution was
beyond me. It was as if the controlling powers
were flitting, invisible, just above my head, just
beyond my grasp. There was obviously some-
thing vibrating; some cord, somewhere, stretched
very taut and quivering. But I could think of
no better solution than : " You must have done
with him." It seemed obvious, too, that that
was impossible, was outside the range of things
that could be done — ^but I had to do my best.
" It's a— it's vile," I added, " vile."

"Oh, I know, I know," she said, "for you
. . . And Fm even sorry. But it has to be
gone on with. De Mersch has to go under in
just this way. It can't be any other."

" Why not? " I asked, because she had paused.
I hadn't any desire for enlightenment.

" It isn't even only Churchill," she said, " not
even only that de Mersch will bring down

[i88]

CHAPTER TWELVE

Churchill with him. It is that he must bring
down everything that Churchill stands for. You
know what that is — ^the sort of probity, all the
old order of things. And the more vile the means
used to destroy de Mersch the more vile the
whole affair will seem. People — ^the sort of
people — ^have an idea that a decent man cannot
be touched by tortuous intrigues. And the
whole thing will be— oh, malodorous. You un-
derstand."

" I don't," I answered, " I don't understand at
alL"

" Ah, yes, you do," she said, " you understand
. . ." She paused for a long while, and I was
silent. I understood vaguely what she meant;
that if Churchill fell amid the clouds of dust of
such a collapse, there would be an end of belief
in probity ... or nearly an end. But I
could not see what it all led up to; where it left us,

" You see," she began again, " I want to make
it as little painful to you as I can; as little pain-
ful as explanations can make it. I can't feel as
you feel, but I can see, rather dimly, what it is
that hurts you. And so ... I want to; I
really want to."

[189]

THE INHERITORS

" But you won't do the one thing," I returned
hopelessly to the charge.

"I cannot," she answered, *'it must be like
that; there isn't any way. You are so tied down
to these little things. Don't you see that de
Mersch, and — ^and all these people — don't really
count? They aren't anything at all in the scheme
of things. I think that, even for you, they aren't
worth bothering about. They're only accidents;
the accidents that "

"That what?" I asked, although I began to
see dimly what she meant.

"That lead in the inevitable," she answered.
" Don't you see? Don't you understand? We
are the inevitable . . . and you can't keep
us back. We have to come and you, you will
only hurt yourself, by resisting." A sense that
this was the truth, the only truth, beset me. It
was for the moment impossible to think of any-
thing else — of anything else in the world. " You
must accept us and all that we mean, you
must stand back; sooner or later. Look even all
round you, and you will understand better. You
are in the house of a type — a type that became
impossible. Oh, centuries ago. And that type

[190]

CHAPTER TWELVE

too, tried very hard to keep back the inevitable;
not only because itself went under, but because
everjrthing that it stood for went under. And
it had to suffer — ^heartache . . . that sort of
suffering. Isn't it so? "

I did not answer; the illustration was too
abominably just. It was just that. There were
even now all these people — these Legitimists —
sneering ineffectually; shutting themselves away
from the light in their mournful houses and suf-
fering horribly because everything that they
stood for had gone under.

" But even if I believe you," I said, " the thing
is too horrible, and your tools are too mean ; that
man who has just gone out and — and Callan—
are they the weapons of the inevitable? After
all, the Revolution ..." I was striving to
get back to tangible ideas — ideas that one could
name and date and label . .' . " the Revolu-
tion was noble in essence and made for good.
But all this of yours is too vile and too petty.
You are bribing, or something worse, that man
to betray his master. And that you call helping
on the inevitable . . ."

"They used to say just that of the Revolution.

[191]

THE INHERITORS

That wasn't nice of its tools. Don't you sec?
They were the people that went under . . «
They couldn't see the good ..."

" And I — ^I am to take it on trust," I said, bit-
terly.

" You couldn't see the good," she answered,
"it isn't possible, and there is no way of ex-
plaining. Our languages are different, and
there's no bridge — ^no bridge at all. We can't j
meet . . ." |

It was that revolted me. If there was no
bridge and we could not meet, we must even
fight; that is, if I believed her version of herself.
If I did not, I was being played the fool with.
I preferred to think that. If she were only fool-
ing me she remained attainable. If it was as she
said, there was no hope at all— not any.

" I don't believe you," I said, suddenly. I
didn't want to believe her. The thing was too
abominable — ^too abominable for words, and in-
credible. I struggled against it as one struggles
against inevitable madness, against the thought
of it. It hung over me, stupefying, deadening.
One could only fight it with violence, crudely, in
jerks, as one struggles against the numbness of

[192]

CHAPTER TWELVE

frost. It was like a pall, like descending clouds
of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the
absurdly lofty room — this belief in what she stood
for, in what she said she stood for.

" I don't believe you," I proclaimed, " I
won't . . . You are playing the fool with
me . • . trying to get round me . . .
to make me let you go on with these — ^with
these — It is abominable. Think of what it
means for me, what people are saying of me, and
I am a decent man — ^You shall not. Do you
understand, you shall not. It is unbearable
. . . and you . . . you try to fool me
. . . in order to keep me quiet . . ."

" Oh, no," she said. " Oh, no."

She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly
as she could touch it. I remember it now, as one
remembers these things. But then I passed it
over. I was too much moved myself to notice
it more than subconsciously, as one notices
things past which one is whirled. And I was
whirled past these things, in an ungovernable
fury at the remembrance of what I had suffered,
of what I had still to suffer. I was speaking with
intense rage, jerking out words, ideas, as flood-

[193]

THE INHERITORS

water jerks through a sluice the debris of once
ordered fields.

"You are," I said, "you are — ^you — ^you —
dragging an ancient name through the dust —
you . . ."

I forget what I said. But I remember, " drag-
ging an ancient name." It struck me, at the
time, by its forlornness, as part of an appeal to
her. It was so pathetically tiny a motive, so out
of tone, that it stuck in my mind. I only re-
member the upshot of my speech; that, unless
she swore— oh, yes, swore — ^to have done with
de Mersch, I would denounce her to my aunt at
that very moment and in that very house.

And she said that it was impossible.

(194]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1HAD a sense of walking very fast — ^almost
of taking flight— down a long dim corridor,
and of a door that opened into an immense
room. All that I remember of it, as I saw it
then, was a number of pastel portraits of weak,
vacuous individuals, in dulled, gilt, oval frames.
The heads stood out from the panelling and
stared at me from between ringlets, from under
powdered hair, simpering, or contemptuous with
the expression that must have prevailed in the
monde of the time before the Revolution. At a
great distance, bent over account - books and
pink cheques on the flap of an escritoire, sat my
aunt, very small, very grey, very intent on her
work.

The people who built these rooms must have
had some property of the presence to make them
bulk large — ^if they ever really did so— in the eyes
of dependents, of lackeys. Perhaps it was their
sense of ownership that gave them the necessary
prestige. My aunt, who was only a temporary

(195]

THE INHERITORS

occupanti certainly had none of it. Bent in-
tently over her accounts, peering through her
spectacles at columns of figures, she was nothing
but a little old woman alone in an immense room.
It seemed impossible that she could really have
any family pride, any pride of any sort. She
looked round at me over her spectacles, across
her shoulder.

'* Ah . . . Etchingham/' she said. She
seemed to be tr3dng to carry herself back to Eng-
land, to the England of her land-agent and her
select visiting list. Here she was no more su-
perior than if we had been on a desert island. I
wanted to enlighten her as to the woman she was
sheltering — ^wanted to very badly; but a neces-
sity for introducing the matter seemed to arise
as she gradually stiffened into assertiveness.

" My dear aunt," I said, '* the woman . . ."
The alien nature of the theme grew suddenly for-
midable. She looked at me arousedly.

" You got my note then," she said. " But I
don't think a woman can have brought it. I
have given such strict orders. They have such
strange ideas here, though. And Madame — ^the
partiire — ^is an old retainer of M. de Luynes, I

1 196]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

haven't much influence over her. It is absurd,
but . . ." It seems that the old lady in the
lodge made a point of carrying letters that went
by hand. She had an eye for gratuities — and
the police, I should say, were concerned. They
make a good deal of use of that sort of person
in that neighbourhood of infinitesimal and un-
ceasing plotting.

"I didn't mean that," 1 said, "but the
woman who calls herself my sister . . ."

" My dear nephew," she interrupted, with
tranquil force, as if she were taking an arranged
line, " I cannot — I absolutely cannot be worried
with your quarrels with your sister. As I said
to you in my note of this morning, when you are
in this town you must consider this house your
home. It is almost insulting of you to go to an
inn. I am told it is even . . . quite an unfit
place that you are stopping at — for a member of
our family."

I maintained for a few seconds a silence of
astonishment.

" But," I returned to the charge, " the matter
is one of importance. You must understand
that she . . ."

[197]

THE INHERITORS

My aunt stiffened and froze. It was as if
I had committed some flagrant sin against eti-
quette.

" If I am satisfied as to her behaviour," she
said, *' I think that you might be/' She paused
as if she were satisfied that she had set me hope-
lessly in the wrong.

I don't withdraw my invitation," she said.

You must understand I wish you to come here.
But your quarrels you and she must settle. On
those terms . . ."

She had the air of conferring an immense
favour, as if she believed that I had, all my life
through, been waiting for her invitation to come
within the pale. As for me, I felt a certain relief
at having the carrying out of my duty made im-
possible for me. I did not want to tell my aunt
and thus to break things off definitely and for
good. Something would have happened; the
air might have cleared as it clears after a storm;
I should have learnt where I stood. But I was
afraid of the knowledge. Light in these dark
places might reveal an abyss at my feet. I
wanted to let things slide.

My aunt had returned to her accounts, the ac-

[198]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

counts which were the cog-wheels that kept run-
ning the smooth course of the Etchingham es-
tates. She seemed to wish to indicate that I
counted for not very much in the scheme of
things as she saw it.

" I should like to make your better acquaint-
ance," she said, with her head still averted, " there
are reasons . . ." It came suddenly into my
head that she had an idea of testamentary dis-
positions, that she felt she was breaking up, that
I had my rights. I didn't much care for the
thing, but the idea of being the heir of Etching-
ham was — ^well, was an idea. It would make
me more possible to my pseudo-sister. It would
be, as it were, a starting-point, would make me
potentially a somebody of her sort of ideal.
Moreover, I should be under the same roof, near
her, with her sometimes. One asks so little
more than that, that it seemed almost half the
battle. I began to consider phrases of thanks
and acceptance and then uttered them.

I never quite understood the bearings of that
scene; never quite whether my aunt really knew
that my sister was not my sister. She was a
wonderfully clever woman of the unscrupulous

[199I

THE INHERITORS

order, with a sang-froid and self-possession weD
calculated to let her cut short any inconvenient
revelations. It was as if she had had long prac-
tice in the art, though I cannot say what occasion
she can have had for its practice — ^perhaps for the
confounding of wavering avowers of Dissent at
home.

I used to think that she knew, if not all, at least
a portion ; that the weight that undoubtedly was
upon her mind was nothing else but that. She
broke up, was breaking up from day to day, and
I can think of no other reason. She had the air
of being disintegrated, like a mineral under an
immense weight — quartz in a crushing mill; of
being dulled and numbed as if she were under
the influence of narcotics.

There is little enough wonder, if she actually
carried that imponderable secret about with her.
I used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if
she, too, saw the oncoming of the inevitable. She
was limited enough in her ideas, but not too
stupid to take that in if it presented itself. In-
deed they have that sort of idea rather grimly
before them all the time — ^that class.

It must have been that that was daily, and little

[200]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

by little, pressing down her eyelids and deepen-
ing the quivering lines of her impenetrable face.
She had a certain solitary grandeur, the pathos
attaching to the last of a race, of a type; the
air of waiting for the deluge, of listening for an
inevitable sound — the sound of oncoming
waters.

It was weird, the time that I spent in that
house — more than weird— deadening. It had
an extraordinary effect on me — ^an effect that
my "sister," perhaps, had carefully calculated.
She made pretensions of that sort later on; said
that she had been breaking me in to perform
my allotted task in the bringing on of the inevi-
table.

I have nowhere come across such an intense
solitude as there was there, a solitude that threw
one so absolutely upon one's self and into one's
self. I used to sit working in one of those tall,
panelled rooms, very high up in the air. I was
writing at the series of articles for the BirMonth-
ly^ for Polehampton. I was to get the atmos-
phere of Paris, you remember. It was rather
extraordinary, that process. Up there I seemed
to be as much isolated from Paris as if I had been

I 201]

THE INHERITORS

in — ^well, in Hampton Court. It was almost im-
possible to write; I had things to think about:
preoccupations, jealousies. It was true I had a
living to make, but that seemed to have lost its
engrossingness as a pursuit, or at least to have
suspended it.

The panels of the room seemed to act as a
sounding-board, the belly of an immense *cello.
There were never any noises in the house, only
whispers coming from an immense distance — ^as
when one drops stones down an unfathomable
well and hears ages afterward the faint sound of
disturbed waters. When I look back at that
time I figure myself as forever sitting with up-
lifted pen, waiting for a word that would not
come, and that I did not much care about get-
ting. The panels of the room would creak
sympathetically to the opening of the entrance-
door of the house, the faintest of creaks; people
would cross the immense hall to the room in
which they plotted; would cross leisurely, with
laughter and rustling of garments that after a
long time reached my ears in whispers. Then
I would have an access of mad jealousy. I
wanted to be part of her life, but I could not

[202]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

stand that Salon of suspicious conspirators.
What could I do there? Stand and look at them,
conscious that they all dropped their voices in-
stinctively when I came near them?

That was the general tone of that space of
time, but, of course, it was not always that. I
used to emerge now and then to breakfast sym-
pathetically with my aunt, sometimes to sit
through a meal with the two of them. I danced
attendance on them singly; paid depressing calls
with my aunt; calls on the people in the Fau-
bourg; people without any individuality other
than a kind of desiccation, the shrivelled appear-
ance and point of view of a dried pippin. In
revenge, they had names that startled one, names
that recalled the generals and flaneurs of an im-
possibly distant time; names that could hardly
have had any existence outside the memoirs of
Madame de S^vigne, the names of people that
could hardly have been fitted to do anything
more vigorous than be reflected in the mirrors
of the Salle des Glaces. I was so absolutely de-
pressed, so absolutely in a state of suspended
animation, that I seemed to conform exactly to
my aunt's ideas of what was desirable in me as

[^3l

!

I

THE INHERITORS

an attendant on her at these functions. I used
to stand behind chairs and talk, like a good
young man, to the assorted Pires and Abhis who
were generally present.

And then I use4 to go home and get the at-
mospheres of these people. I must have done it
abominably badly, for the notes that brought
Polehampton's cheques were accompanied by
the bravos of that gentleman and the assurances
that Miss Polehampton liked my work — ^liked it
very much.

I suppose I exhibited myself in the capacity of
the man who knew — ^who could let you into a
thing or two. After all, anyone could write
about students' balls and the lakes in the Bois,
but it took someone to write " with knowledge "
of the interiors of the barred houses in the Rue
de rUniversite.

Then, too, I attended the more showy enter-
tainments with my sister. I had by now become
so used to hearing her styled " your sister " that
the epithet had the quality of a name. She was
" mademoiselle votre soeur," as she might have
been Mile. Patience or Hope, without having
anything of the named quality. What she did at

[204]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

the entertainments, the charitable bazaars, the
dismal dances, the impossibly bad concerts, I
have no idea. She must have had some purpose,
for she did nothing without. I myself descended
into fulfilling the functions of a rudimentarily
developed chaperon — functions similar in im-
portance to those performed by the eyes of a
mole. I had the maddest of accesses of jealousy
if she talked to a man — and such men— or danced
with one. And then I was forever screwing my
courage up and feeling it die away. We used to
drive about in a coupe, a thing that shut us in-
exorably together, but which quite as inexorably
destroyed all opportunities for what . one calls
making love. In smooth streets its motion was
too glib, on the pave it rattled too abominably.
I wanted to make love to her— oh, immensely,
but I was never in the mood, or the opportunity
was never forthcoming. I used to have the wild-
est fits of irritation; not of madness or of depres-
sion, but of simple wildness at the continual re-
currence of small obstacles. I couldn't read,
couldn't bring myself to it. I used to sit and
look dazedly at the English newspapers — at any
newspaper but the Hour. De Mersch had, fot

1 205 ]

THE INHERITORS

the moment, disappeared. There were troubles
in his elective grand duchy — ^he had, indeed, con-
trived to make himself unpopular with the elec-
tors, excessively unpopular. I used to read
piquant articles about his embroglio in an Ameri-
can paper that devoted itself to matters of the
sort. All sorts of international difficulties were
to arise if de Mersch were ejected. There was
some other obscure prince of a rival house, Prus-
sian or Russian, who had desires for the degree
of royalty that sat so heavily on de Mersch. In-
deed, I think there were two rival princes, each
waiting with portmanteaux packed and mani-
festos in their breast pockets, ready to pass de
Mersch's frontiers.

The grievances of his subjects — so the Paris-
American Gazette said — were intimately con-
nected with matters of finance, and de Mersch's
personal finances and his grand ducal were in-
extricably mixed up with the wild-cat schemes
with which he was seeking to make a fortune
large enough to enable him to laugh at half
a dozen elective grand duchies. Indeed, de
Mersch's own portmanteau was reported to be
packed against the day when British support of

[206]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

his Greenland schemes would let him afford to
laugh at his cantankerous Diet.

The thing interested me so little that I never
quite mastered the details of it. I wished th€
man no good, but so long as he kept out of my
way I was not going to hate him actively. Fi-
nally the affairs of Holstein-Launewitz ceased to
occupy the papers — the thing was arranged and
the Russian and Prussian princes unpacked their
portmanteaux, and, I suppose, consigned their
manifestos to the flames, or adapted them to the
needs of other principalities. De Mersch's affairs
ceded their space in the public prints to the topic
of the deamess of money. Somebody, some-
where, was said to be up to something. I used
to try to read the articles, to master the details,
because I disliked finding a whole field of
thought of which I knew absolutely nothing. I
used to read about the great discount houses
and other things that conveyed absolutely noth-
ing to my mind. I only gathered that the said
great houses were having a very bad time, and
that everybody else was having a very much
worse.

One day, indeed, the matter was brought home

[207]

THE INHERITORS

to me by the receipt from Polehampton of bills
instead of my usual cheques. I had a good deal
of trouble in cashing the things; indeed, people
seemed to look askance at them. I consulted my
aunt on the subject, at breakfast. It was the sort
of thing that interested the woman of business in
her, and we were always short of topics of con-
versation.

We breakfasted in rather a small room, as
rooms went there; my aunt sitting at the head of
the table, with an early morning air of being en
famille that she wore at no other time of day. It
was not a matter of garments, for she was not the
woman to wear a peignoir; but lay, I supposed,
in her manner, which did not begin to assume
frigidity until several watches of the day had
passed.

I handed her Polehampton's bills and ex-
plained that I was at a loss to turn them to ac-
count; that I even had only the very haziest of
ideas as to their meaning. Holding the forlorn
papers in her hand, she began to lecture me on
the duty of acquiring the rudiments of what she
called " business habits."

" Of course you do not require to master de-
tails to any considerable extent/' she said, '^ but

l208]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

& I always have held that it is one of the duties of

ol a . . ."

j( She interrupted herself as my sister came into

^ the room; looked at her, and then held out the

t papers in her hand. The things quivered a little;

3 the hand must have quivered too.

1^ "You are going to Halderschrodt's? " she

said, interrogatively. " You could get him to ne-

i gotiate these for Etchingham? "

[ Miss Granger looked at the papers negligently.

" I am going this afternoon," she answered.
" Etchingham can come . . ." She sudden-
ly turned to me r " So your friend is getting
shaky," she said.

" It means that? " I asked. " But I've heard
that he has done the same sort of thing before."

" He must have been shaky before," she said,
" but I daresay Halderschrodt . . ."

" Oh, it's hardly worth while bothering that
personage about such a sum," I interrupted.
Halderschrodt, in those days, was a name that
suggested no dealings in any sum less than a
million.

" My dear Etchingham," my aunt interrupted
in a shocked tone, " it is quite worth his while to
oblige us . • ."

THE INHERITORS

" I didn't know," I said.

That afternoon we drove to Halderschrodt's
private office, a sumptuous — ^that is the mot juste
— suite of rooms on the first floor of the house
next to the Due de Mersch's Sans Souci. I sat
on a plush-bottomed gilded chair, whilst my
pseudo-sister transacted her business in an ad-
joining room — a room exactly corresponding
with that within which de Mersch had lurked
whilst the lady was warning me against him.
A clerk came after awhile, carried me off into
an enclosure, where my bill was discounted by
another, and then reconducted me to my plush
chair. I did not occupy it, as it happened. A
meagre, very tall Alsatian was holding the door
open for the exit of my sister. He said nothing
at all, but stood slightly inclined as she passed
him. I caught a glimpse of a red, long face,
very tired eyes, and hair of almost startling
whiteness — ^the white hair of a comparatively
young man, without any lustre of any sort — a
dead white, like that of snow. I remember that
white hair with a feeling of horror, whilst I have
almost forgotten the features of the great Baron
de Halderschrodt.

I had still some of the feeling of having been

[2101

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

in contact with a personality of the most colossal
significance as we went down the red carpet of
the broad white marble stairs. With one foot on
the lowest step, the figure of a perfectly clothed,
perfectly groomed man was standing looking up-
ward at our descent. I had thought so little of
him that the sight of the Due de Mersch's face
hardly suggested any train of emotions. It lit
up with an expression of pleasure,

" You,'' he said.

She stood looking down upon him from the
altitude of two steps, looking with intolerable
passivity.

"So you use the common stairs," she said,
" one had the idea that you communicated with
these people through a private door." He
laughed uneasily, looking askance at me.

" Oh, I . . ." he said.

She moved a little to one side to pass him in
her descent.

"So things have arranged themselves — 7A
haSy' she said, referring, I supposed, to the elec-
tive grand duchy.

" Oh, it was like a miracle," he answered, " and
I owed a great deal — a great deal — ^to your
hints * * •"

[211]

THE INHERITORS

'* You must tell me all about it to-night/' sfie
said.

De Mersch's face had an extraordinary quality
that I seemed to notice in all the faces around
me — a quality of the flesh that seemed to lose all
luminosity, of the eyes that seemed forever to
have a tendency to seek the ground, to avoid the
sight of the world. When he brightened to an-
swer her it was as if with effort. It seemed as if a
weight were on the mind of the whole world — z
preoccupation that I shared without understand-
ing.. She herself, a certain absent-mindedness
apart, seemed the only one that was entirely un-
affected.

' As we sat side by side in the little carriage,
she said suddenly :

" They are coming to the end of their tether,
you see." I shrank away from her a little — ^btit
I did not see and did not want to see. I said so.
It even seemed to me that de Mersch having got
over the troubles Id bas, was taking a new lease
of life.

"I did think." I said, "a little time ago
that ..."

The wheels of the coupe suddenly began to rat-

[ 212 J

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

tie abominably over the cobbles of a narrow
street. It was impossible to talk, and I was
thrown back upon myself. I found that I was
in a temper — in an abominable temper. The
sudden sight of that man, her method of greeting
him, the intimacy that the scene revealed • • .
the whole thing had upset me. Of late, for want
of any alarms, in spite of groundlessness I had
had the impression that I was the integral part
of her life. It was not a logical idea, but strictly
a habit of mind that had grown up in the desola-^
tion of my solitude.

We passed into one of the larger boulevards,
and the thing ran silently.

" That de Mersch was crumbling up,*' she sud-
denly completed my unfinished sentence; "oh,
that was only a grumble — ^premonitory. But it
won't take long now. I have been putting on
the screw. Halderschrodt will . • . I sup-
pose he will commit suicide, in a day or two*
And then the — ^the fun will begin."

I didn't answer. The thing made no impres-
sion — ^no mental impression at all.

[^13 1

THE IVHERITORS

\ cc CUM teU me aH afaoot it to-niebt," sfe

De Mer^cb's bee lad an extraordinaiy quality
t-a: I seecsrf to nodce in aH the £aas around
oe— a q^iZhr of the fiesh that seemed to lose all
h==>DEtT. of the eyes that seemed forever to
hjTt a :c:dc3CT to seek the grotmd, to avoid ffie
Ksbt ci the m-orld. ^^'hen be brightened to an-
swer her h W2S as if with effort. It seemed as if a
weight were oq the nand of the whole world-a
pTKorrrpanca that I shared without underjlafiu-
n:g- She beneU, a certain absent-mindedne.--
apart, seersed the only one that was entirely i: .
affected.

As ** St side by side in the lirtle C3:.
she said sad Jenly;

*" Tber are ctnmng to the end of thc\t
yoQ see." I shrank away from her a i:
I did not see and did not want to sec.
Iteren seemed tome that de ,Mer>.!-
over the troubtes lo bos, was t?.k;'- -
ofltfe.

"I did think." I said, "a '
that . . ."
71»eiriiedsofthecoi;p'^ ■ ■

tie diamiEEur; over lie cobi^ie^ -
ttnti, i wai imposable tc i:_ -
ttnjBn ia:i ctoe myself. - 1=^^ -
ID a lanDEi — e an abomEi-" ^^^
so66Eii5i^> oilhat man, hc^"c:;ii- ~
tern, tie nnsaan- that the s= rrr—
tbe -Braoe thmt had upsr. t:-.

ol airv aiannt. in spue :■ r*-"- ~ -

bad nc impression tiiE,: 1 t_ .. rrr

of bCT lire. Ii was no; i . jz —

a habit oi mind that h. , r: " . _ .
tkm ol my solitude.

We passed intc air . _-. ^^^
aod the thing tel s;:^

" That de Mer-^ ■ r —^ .
denly complete; r — - ;■

that was only t r::z-— = .-
won't take ic: ; _ ^ -.

the screw. h_ ^'

vast

■ung

_ (1 not

id she

I alder-

,u third

!i genius

with the

,, like the

..iiLch fore-

\o(l a chief

::ie defect of

;;.ii weakness.

, r heard them;

.. dynastic revo-

iiii was to cause

1 that had been

ihe had burked

ippose — and the

d Haiderschrodt

ft high and dry.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THAT afternoon we had a scene^ and late
that night another. The memory of the
former is a little blotted out. Things be-
gan to move so quickly that, try as I will to ar-
range their sequence in my mind, I cannot. I
cannot even very distinctly remember what she
told me at that first explanation. I must have
attacked her fiercely — on the score of de Mersch,
in the old vein ; must have told her that I would
not in the interest of the name allow her to see
the man again. She told me things, too, rather
abominable things, about the way in which she
had got Halderschrodt into her power and was
pressing him down. Halderschrodt was 3e
Mersch's banker-in-chief; his fall would mean de
Mersch's, and so on. The " so on " in this case
meant a great deal more. Halderschrodt, ap-
parently, was the " somebody who was up to
something " of the American paper — ^that is to
say the allied firms that Halderschrodt represent-

[214]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

cd. I can't remember the details. They were
too huge and too unfamiliar, and I was too agi-
tated by my own share in the humanity of it.
But, in sum, it seemed that the fall of Halder-
schrodt would mean a sort of incredibly vast
Black Monday — a frightful thing in the existing
state of public confidence, but one which did not
mean much to me. I forget how she said she
had been able to put the screw on him. Haldert-
schrodt, as you must remember, was the third
of his colossal name, a man without much genius
and conscious of the lack, obsessed with the
idea of operating some enormous coup, like the
founder of his dynasty, something in which fore-
sight in international occurrence played a chief
part. That idea was his weakness, the defect of
his mind, and she had played on that weakness,
I forget, I say, the details, if I ever heard them;
they concerned themselves with a dynastic revo-
lution somewhere, a revolution that was to cause
a slump all over the world, and that had been
engfineered in our Salon. And she had burked
the revolution — ^betrayed it, I suppose — ^and the
consequences did not ensue, and Halderschrodt
and all the rest of them were left high and dry.

[2151

THE INHERITORS

The whole thing was a matter of under-cur-
rents that never came to the surface, a matter of
shifting sands from which only those with the
clearest heads could come forth.

" And we ... we have clear heads," she
said. It was impossible to listen to her without
shuddering. For me, if he stood for an)rthing,
Halderschrodt stood for stability; there was the
tremendous name, and there was the person I had
just seen, the person on whom a habit of mind
approaching almost to the royal had conferred a
presence that had some of the divinity that hedges
a king. It seemed frightful merely to imagine
his ignominious collapse; as frightful as if she
had pointed out a splendid-limbed man and said :
" That man will be dead in five minutes." That,
indeed, was what she said of Halderschrodt
. . . The man had saluted her, going to his
death; the austere inclination that I had seen had
been the salutation of such a man.

I was so moved by one thing and another that
I hardly noticed that Gurnard had come into the
room. I had not seen him since the night when
he had dined with the Due de Mersch at Church-
ill's, but he seemed so part of the emotion, of the

[216]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

frame of mind, that he slid noiselessly into the
scene and hardly surprised me. I was called out
of the room — someone desired to see me, and I
passed, without any transition of feeling, into
the presence of an entire stranger — a man who
remains a voice to me. He began to talk to me
about the state of my aunt's health. He said
she was breaking up; that he begged respectfully
to urge that I would use my influence to take
her back to London to consult Sir James — I,
perhaps, living in the house and not having
known my aunt for very long, might not see; but
he . . . He was my aunt's solicitor. He was
quite right; my aunt was breaking up, she had
declined visibly in the few hours that I had been
away from her. She had been doing business
with this man, had altered her will, had seen Mr.
Gurnard; and, in some way had received a shock
that seemed to have deprived her of all volition.
She sat with her head leaning back, her eyes
closed, the lines of her face all seeming to run
downward.

" It is obvious to me that arrangements ought
to be made for your return to England," the
lawyer said, " whatever engagements Miss Gran-

THE INHERITORS

ger or Mn Etchingham Granger or even Mr.
Gurnard may have made."

I wondered vaguely what the devil Mr. Gur-
nard could have to say in the matter, and then
Miss Granger herself came into the room.

" They want me," my aunt said in a low voice,
" they have been persuading me ... to go
back ... to Etchingham, I think you said,
Meredith."

I became conscious that I wanted to return to
England, wanted it very much, wanted to be out
of this; to get somewhere where there was sta-
bility and things that one could understand.
Everything here seemed to be in a mist, with the
ground trembling underfoot.

" Why . . ." Miss Granger's verdict came,
" we can go when you like. To-morrow."

Things immediately began to shape themselves
on these unexpected lines, a sort of bustle of de-
parture to be in the air. I was employed to coh-
d'uct the lawyer as far as the porter's lodge, a
longish traverse. He beguiled the way by ex-
cusing himself for hurrying back to London.

" I might have been of use; in these hurried
departures there are generally things. But, you

[218]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

will understand, Mr. — Mr. Etchingham; at a
time like this I could hardly spare the hours that
it cost me to come over. You would be aston-
ished what a deal of extra work it gives and how
far-spreading the evil is. People seem to have
gone mad. Even I have been astonished."

" I had no idea," I said.

" Of course not, of course not — ^no one had.
But, unless I am much mistaken — much — ^there
will have to be an enquiry, and people will be
very lucky who have had nothing to do with
it "

I gathered that things were in a bad way, over
there as over here; that there were scandals and
a tremendous outcry for purification in the high-
est places. I saw the man get into his fiacre and
took my way back across the court-yard rather
slowly, pondering over the part I was to fill in
the emigration, wondering how far events had
conferred on me a partnership in the family af-
fairs.

I found that my tacitly acknowledged function
was that of supervising nurse-tender, the sort of
thing that made for personal tenderness in the
aridity of profuse hired help. I was expected to

[ 219 1

THE INHERITORS

arrange a rug just a littie more comfortably than
the lady's maid who would travel in the compart-
ment — ^to give the finishing touches.

It was astonishing how well the thing was en-
gineered; the removal, I mean. It gave me an
even better idea of the woman my aunt had been
than had the panic of her solicitor. The thing
went as smoothly as the disappearance of a cara-
van of gypsies, camped for the night on a heath
beside gorse bushes. We went to the ball that
night as if from a household that had its roots
deep in the solid rock, and in the morning we
had disappeared.

The ball itself was a finishing touch — ^the finish-
ing touch of my sister's affairs and the end of my
patience. I spent an interminable night, one of
those nights that never end and that remain
quivering and raw in the memory. I seemed to
be in a blaze of light, watching, through a shift-
ing screen of shimmering dresses — ^her and the
Due de Mersch. I don't know whether the thing
was really noticeable, but it seemed that every-
one was — that everyone must be — ^remarking it.
I thought I caught women making smile-punctu-
ated remarks behind fans, men answering in-

[220]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

audibly with eyes discreetly on the ground. It
was a mixed assembly, somebody's liquidation of
social obligations, and there was a sprinkling of
the kind of people who do make remarks. It was
not the noticeability for its own sake that I hated,
but the fact that their relations by their notice-
ability made me impossible, whilst the notice
itself confirmed my own fears. I hung, glower-
ing in comers, noticeable enough myself, I sup-
pose.

The thing reached a crisis late in the evening.
There was a kind of winter-garden that one
strolled in, a place of giant palms stretching up
into a darkness of intense shadow. I was prowl-
ing about in the shadows of great metallic leaves,
cursing under my breath, in a fury of nervous ir-
ritation; quivering like a horse martyrised by a
stupidly merciless driver. I happened to stand
back for a moment in the narrowest of paths, with
the touch of spiky leaves on my hand and on my
face. In front of me was the glaring perspective
of one of the longer alleys, and, stepping into it, a
great bandx)f blue ribbon cutting across his chest,
came de Mersch with her upon his arm. De
Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a way

[221]

THE INHERITORS

of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside
her maenadic glow. There was something over-
powering in the sight of her, in the fire of her
eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise
of her head. She wore some kind of early nine-
teenth-century dress, sweeping low from the
waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one
with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality
of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she
stepped with the buoyancy — ^the long steps — of
a triumphing Diana.

It was more than terrible for me to stand there
longing with a black, baffled longing, with some
of the base quality of an eavesdropper and all
the baseness of the unsuccessful.

Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving
insensibly down the long, glaring corridor, a
sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his
oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture.
Well within my field of sight he overtook them
and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that sug-
gested supreme intimacy, walked beside them.
I stood for some moments — ^for some minutes,
and then hastened after them. I was going to
do something. After a time I found de Mersch

[222]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

and Gurnard standing facing each other in one
of the doorways of the place — Gurnard, a small,
dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, over-
whelming, florid, standing with his legs well
apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal
of gesture. I approached them from the side,
standing rather insistently at his elbow.

" I want," I said, " I would be extremely glad
if you would give me a minute, monsieur." I
was conscious that I spoke with a tremour of
the voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was
unaware of what course I was to pursue, but I
was confident of calmness, of self-control — I was
equal to that. They had a pause of surprised
silence. Gurnard wheeled and fixed me criti-
cally with his eye-glass. I took de Mersch a
little apart, into a solitude of palm branches,
and began to speak before he had asked me my
errand.

" You must understand that I would not inter-
fere without a good deal of provocation," I was
saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a
thick, jovial voice.

" Oh, we will understand that, my good
Granger, and then . . ."

[ 223 ]

THE INHERITORS

" It is about my sister," I said — " you — ^you go
too far. I must ask you, as a gentleman, to cease
persecuting her."

He answered " The devil ! " and then : " If I
do not ? "

It was evident in his voice, in his manner, that
the man was a little — ^well, gris. " If you do not,'*
I said, " I shall forbid her to see you and I
shall . . ."

*' Oh, oh ! " he interjected with the intonation
of a reveller at a farce. " We are at that — ^we are
the excellent brother." He paused, and then
added : " Well, go to the devil, you and your for-
bidding," He spoke with the greatest good
humour.

" I am in earnest," I said; " very much in ear-
nest. The thing has gone too far, and even for
your own sake, you had better . . ."

He said " Ah, ah ! " in the tone of his " Oh,
oh!"

" She is no friend to you," I struggled on,
" she is playing with you for her own purposes;
you will ..."

He swayed a little on his feet and said:
** Bravo . . . bravissimo. If we can't for-

(224]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

bid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good
fellow . . ." and then, " Come, go on • . ."

I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came
into my head dimly that I wanted him to strike
me, to give me an excuse — ^anything to end the
scene violently, with a crash and exclamations
of fury.

"You absolutely refuse to pay any atten-
tion? " I said.

" Oh, absolutely," he answered.

"You know that I can do something, that
I can expose you." I had a vague idea that I
could, that the number of small things that
I knew to his discredit and the mass of my hatred
could be welded into a damning whole. He
laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The
dawn was beginning to spread pallidly above us,
gleaming mournfully through the glass of the
palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up,
on their way out of the place.

" You may go . . ." he was beginning.
But the expression of his face altered. Miss
Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the
world, was coming out of the inner door.
"We have been having a charming . . .'*

[ 225 1

THE INHERITORS

he began to her. She touched me gently on
the arm.

" Come, Arthur," she said, and then to him,
" You have heard the news? "

He looked at her rather muzzily.

" Baron Halderschrodt has committed sui-
cide," she said. " Come, Arthur."

We passed on slowly, but de Mersch fol-
lowed.

" You — ^you aren't in earnest? " he said, catch-
ing at her arm so that we swung round and faced
him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his
eyes, as if he hoped that by unsaying she could
remedy an irremediable disaster, and there was
nothing left of him but those panic-stricken, be-
seeching eyes.

" Monsieur de Sabran told me," she answered;
" he had just come from making the constatation.
Besides, you can hear ..."

Half-sentences came to our ears from groups
that passed us. A very old man with a nose that
almost touched his thick lips, was saying to an-
other of the same type :

" Shot himself . . . through the left tem-
ple .. . MonDieu!"

[226]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

De Mersch walked slowly down the long cor-
ridor away from us. There was an extraordinary
stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emu-
late the goose step of his days in the Prussian
Guard. My companion looked after him as
though she wished to gauge the extent of hia
despair.

" You would say ' Habet,* wouldn't yo|i? " she
asked me.

I thought we had seen the last of him, but as
in the twilight of the dawn we waited for the lodge
gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs came
down the long street, and a carriage drew level
with ours. A moment after, de Mersch was
knocking at our window.

"You will . . . you will . . .*' he
stuttered, "speak . .• . to Mr. Gurnard.
That is our only chance . . . now." His
voice came in mingled with the cold. air of the
morning. I shivered. "You have so much
power • * . with him and . . ."

"Oh, I . . .*' she answered.

" The thing must go through," he said again,
" or else . . ." He paused. The great gates
in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw

[22;]

THE INHERITORS

into the courtyard. The light was growing
stronger. She did not answer.

" I tell you," he asseverated insistently, " if the
British Government abandons my railway all our
plans . . ."

" Oh, the Government won't abandon it," she
said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He
stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we
turned in and left him standing there.

In the great room which was usually given up
to the political plotters stood a table covered with
eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver
sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and
of a fierce excitement that made the thought of
sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat
unconsciously, pacing up and down the while.
She was standing beside the table in the glow of
the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed
in the long windows. It was very cold and hid-
eously late; away in those endless small hours
when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags,
when time is effaced.

" You see? " she said suddenly.

[ 228 1

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Oh, I see," I answered — " and . . . and
now?"

"Now we are almost done with each other,"
she answered.

I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never
looked at things in that way, had never really
looked things in the face. I had grown so used
to the idea that she was to parcel out the remain-
der of my life, had grown so used to the feeling
that I was the integral portion of her life . . .
" But I—" I said. " What is to become of me? "

She stood looking down at the ground . . .
for a long time. At last she said in a low mono-
tone:

" Oh, you must try to forget."

A new idea struck me — luminously, over-
whelming. I grew reckless. " You — ^you are
growing considerate," I taunted. " You are not
so sure, not so cold. I notice a change in you.
Upon my soul . . ."

Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly
closed again. She said nothing. I grew con-
scious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning
life. She was going away. I should be alone.
The future began to exist again, looming up like

[229]

THE INHERITORS

a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal,
overwhelming — ^a hideous future of irremediable
remorse, of solitude, of craving.

" You are going back to work with Church-
ill," she said suddenly.

" How did you know ? " I asked breathlessly.
My despair of a sort found vent in violent inter-
jecting of an imrtiaterial query.

'* You leave your letters about," she said.
" and ... It will be best for you."

" It will not," I said bitterly. " It could never
be the same. I don't want to see Churchill. I
want . . ."

" You want? " she asked, in a low monotone.

" You," I answered.

She spoke at last, very slowly:

" Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard.'*

I don't know just what I said then, but I re-
meitiber that I found myself repeating over and
over again, the phrases running metrically up
and down my mind : " You couldn't marry Gur-
nard; you don't know what he is. You couldn't
marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is." I
don't suppose that I knew anything to the dis-
credit of Gurnard — ^but he struck me in that way

[230]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

at that moment; struck me convincingly — ^more
than any array of facts could have done.

" Oh — ^as for what he is — " she said, and
paused. "/ know . . ." and then suddenly
she began to speak very fast.

" Don't you see? — can't you see? — ^that I don't
marry Gurnard for what he is in that sense, but
for what he is in the other. It isn't a marriage in
your sense at all. And . . . and it doesn't
affect you . . . don't you see? We have to
have done with one another, because . . .
because . . ."

I had an inspiration.

" I believe," I said, very slowly, " I believe •
. . you do care . . ."

She said nothing.

" You care," I repeated.

She spoke then with an energy that had some-
thing of a threat in it. " Do you think I would?
Do you think I could? ... or dare? Don't
you understand? " She faltered — " but then
. . ." she added, and was silent for a long min-
ute. I felt the throb of a thousand pulses in my
head, on my temples. " Oh, yes, I care," she
said slowly, " but that — that makes it all the

[231]

THE INHERITORS

worse. Why, yes, I care — ^yes, yes. It hurts me
to see you. I might ... It would draw me
away. I have my allotted course. And jou —
Don't you see, you would influence me; you
would be — ^you are — ^ disease — ^for me."

" But," I said, " I could— I would— do any-
thing."

I had only the faintest of ideas of what I would
do — ^for her sake.

" Ah, no," she said, " you must not say that.
You don't understand . . . Even that would
mean misery for you — ^and I — I could not bear.
Don't you see? Even now, before you have
done your allotted part, I am wanting— oh, want-
ing — to let you go . . . But I must not; I
must not. You must go on . . . and bear it
for a little while more — ^and then . . ."

There was a tension somewhere, a string some-
where that was stretched tight and vibrating. I
was tremulous with an excitement that overmas-
tered my powers of speech, that surpassed my
understanding.

Don't you see . . ." she asked again,

you are the past — the passing. We could
never meet. You are . . . for me . . .

[232]

it

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

only the portrait of a man — of a man who has
been dead— oh, a long time; and I, for you, only
a possibility ... a conception . . . You
work to bring me on — ^to make me possible."

" But — " I said. The idea was so difficult to
grasp. " I will — ^there must be a way "

" No,*' she answered, " there is no way — ^you
must go back; must try. There will be Church-
ill and what he stands for — He won't die, he
won't even care much for losing this game
. . . not much . . . And you will have
to forget me. There is no other way — ^no bridge.
We can't meet, you and I . . ."

The words goaded me to fury. I began to
pace furiously up and down. I wanted to tell
her that I would throw away everything for her,
would crush myself out, would be a lifeless tool,
would do an)rthing. But I could tear no words
out of the stone that seemed to surround me.

*' You may even tell him, if you like, what I
and Gurnard are going to do. It will make no
difference; he will fall. But you would like him
to — ^to make a good fight for it, wouldn't you?
That is all I can do . . . for your sake."

I began to speak — as if I had not spoken for

I ^33 ]

THE INHERITORS

years. The house seemed to be coming to life;
there were noises of opening doors, of voices out-
side.

" I believe you care enough," I said " to give
it all up for me. I believe you do, and I want
you." I continued to pace up and down. The
noises of returning day grew loud; frightfully
loud. It was as if I must hasten, must get said
what I had to say, as if I must raise my voice to
make it heard amid the clamour of a world awak-
ening to life.

" I believe you do ... I believe you do
. . ." I said again and again, "'and I want
you." My voice rose higher and higher. She
stood motionless, an inscrutable white figure,
like some silent Greek statue, a harmony of fall-
ing folds of heavy drapery perfectly motionless.

" I want you," I said — " I want you, I want
you, I want you." It was unbearable to myself.

" Oh, be quiet," she said at last. " Be quiet I
If you had wanted me I have been here. It is
too late. All these days; all these "

"But . . ."I said.

From without someone opened the great shut-
ters of the windows, and the light from the out-
side world burst in upon us.

l«34]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

WE parted in London next day, I hardly
know where. She seemed so part of
my being, was for me so little more
than an intellectual force, so little of a physical
personality, that I cannot remember where my
eyes lost sight of her.

I had desolately made the crossing from coun-
try to country, had convoyed my aunt to her big
house in one of the gloomy squares in ia certain
district, and then we had parted. Even after-
ward it was as if she were still beside me, as if I
had only to look round to find her eyes upon mc.
She remained the propelling force, I a boat thrust
out upon a mill-pond, moving more and more
slowly. I had been for so long in the shadow
of that great house, shut in among the gloom,
that all this light, this blazing world — ^it was a
June day in London — ^seemed impossible, and
hateful. Over there, there had been nothing but
very slow, fading minutes ; now there was a past,

[^35]

THE INHERITORS

a future. It was as if I stood between them in
a cleft of unscalable rocks.

I went about mechanically, made arrangements
for my housing, moved in and out of rooms in
the enormous mausoleum of a club that was all
the home I had, in a sort of stupor. Suddenly I
remembered that I had been thinking of some-
thing; that she had been talking of Churchill.
I had had a letter from him on the morning of
the day before. When I read it, Churchill and
his " Cromwell " had risen in my mind like pre-
posterous phantoms; the one as unreal as the
other — as alien. I seemed to have passed an in-
finity of aeons beyond them. The one and the
other belonged as absolutely to the past as a
past year belongs. The thought of them did not
bring with it the tremulously unpleasant sensa-
tions that, as a rule, come with the thoughts of
a too recent temps jadis, but rather as a vein of
rose across a gray evening. I had passed his
letter over; had dropped it half-read among the
litter of the others. Then there had seemed to
be a haven into whose mouth I was drifting.

Now I should have to pick the letters up again,
all of them; set to work desolately to pick up the

[236]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

threads of the past; and work it back into life as
one does half-drowned things. I set about it list-
lessly. There remained of that time an errand
for my aunt, an errand that would take me to
Etchingham; something connected with her land
steward. I think the old lady had ideas of in-
ducting me into a position that it had grown
tacitly acknowledged I was to fill. I was to go
down there; to see about some alterations that
were in progress; and to make arrangements
for my aunt's return. I was so tired, so dog
tired, and the day still had so many weary hours
to run, that I recognised instinctively that if I
were to come through it sane I must tire myself
more, must keep on going — until I sank. I
drifted down to Etchingham that evening. I
sent a messenger over to Churchiirs cottage,
waited for an answer that told me that Churchill
was there, and then slept, and slept.

I woke back in the world again, in a world that
contained the land steward and the manor house*
I had a sense of recovered power from the sight
of them, of the sunlight on the stretches of turf,
of the mellow, golden stonework of the long
range of buildings, from the sound of a chime of

[2371

THE INHERITORS

bells that came wonderfully sweetly over the soft
swelling of the close turf. The feeling came not
from any sense of prospective ownership, but
from the acute consciousness of what these things
stood for. I did not recognise it then, but later
I understood; for the present it was enough to
have again the power to set my foot on the
ground, heel first. In the streets of the little
town there was a sensation of holiday, not pro-
nounced enough to call for flags, but enough to
convey the idea of waiting for an event.

The land steward, at the end of a tour amongst
cottages, explained there was to be a celebration
in the neighbourhood — z " cock-and-hen show
with a political annex " ; the latter under the aus-
pices of Miss Churchill. Churchill himself was
to speak ; there was a possibility of a pronounce-
ment. I found London reporters at my inn, men
I half knew. They expressed mitigated delight
at the view of me, and over a lunch-table let me
know what " one said '' — ^what one said of the
outside of events I knew too well internally.
They most of them had the air of my aunt's so-
licitor when he had said, " Even I did not realise
. . ." their positions saving them the neces-

[238]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

sity of concealing surprise. " One can't know
everything." They fumbled amusingly about the
causes, differed with one another, but were sur-
prisingly unanimous as to effects, as to the panic
and the call for purification. It was rather ex-
traordinary, too, how large de Mersch loomed
on the horizon over here. It was as if the whole
world centred in him, as if he represented the
modern spirit that must be purified away by
burning before things could return to their nor-
mal state. I knew what he represented . . .
but there it was.

It was part of my programme, the attendance
at the poultry show; I was to go back to the
cottage with Churchill, after he had made his
speech. It was rather extraordinary, the sensa-
tions of that function. I went in rather late, with
the reporter of the Hour, who was anxious to
do me the favour of introducing me without pay-
ment — it was his way of making himself pleasant,
and I had the reputation of knowing celebrities.
It zvas rather extraordinary to be back again in
the midst of this sort of thing, to be walking over
a crowded, green paddock, hedged in with tall
trees and dotted here and there with the gaily

[239]

THE INHERITORS

striped species of tent that is called marquee.
And the type of face, and the style of the cos-
tume I They would have seemed impossible the
day before yesterday.

There were all Miss Churchill's gang of great
dames, muslin, rustling, marriageable daugh-
ters, a continual twitter of voices, and a sprinkling
of the peasantry, dun-coloured and struck speech-
less.

One of the great ladies surveyed me as I stood
in the centre of an open space, surveyed me
through tortoise-shell glasses on the end of a
long handle, and beckoned me to her side.

" You are unattached? " she asked. She had
pretensions to voice the county, just as my aunt
undoubtedly set the tone of its doings, decided
who was visitable, and just as Miss Churchill gave
the political tone. " You may wait upon me,
then,*' she said; " my daughter is with her young
man. That is the correct phrase, is it not? "

She was a great lady, who stood nearly six foot
high, and whom one would have styled buxom,
had one dared. " I have a grievance," she went
on; "I must talk to someone. Come this way.
Therer' She pointed with the handle of her

[240]

i
I
i

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

glasses to a pen of glossy blackbirds. " You see!
. . . Not even commended! — and I assure
you the trouble I have taken over them, with the
idea of setting an example to the tenantry, is in-
credible. They give a prize to one of our own
tenants . . . which is as much as telling the
man that he is an example to me. Then they
wonder that the country is going to the dogs. I
assure you that after breakfast I have had the
scraps collected from the plates — that was the
course recommended by the poultry manuals —
and have taken them out with my own hands."
The sort of thing passed for humour in the
county, and, being delivered with an air and a
half Irish ruefulness, passed well enough.

And that reminds me," she went on, " — I
mean the fact that the country is going to the
dogs, as my husband [You haven't seen him
an5nvhere, have you? He is one of the judges,
and I want to have a word with him about my
Orpingtons] says every morning after he has
looked at his paper — that ... oh, that you
have been in Paris, haven't you? with your aunt.
Then, of course, you have seen this famous Due
de Mersch?"

[241]

THE INHERITORS

She looked at me humourously through her
glasses. " I'm going to pump you, you know,"
she said, ** it is the duty that is expected of me.
I have to talk for a countyful of women without
a tongue in their heads. So tell me about him.
Is it true that he is at the bottom of all this mis-
chief? Is it through him that this man com-
mitted suicide? They say so. He was mixed
up in that Royalist plot, wasn*t he? — and the
people that have been failing all over the place
are mixed up with him, aren't they? "

"I . . . I really don't know,'' I said; "if
you say so ..."

" Oh, I assure you I'm sound enough," she an-
swered, " the Churchills — I know you're a friend
of his — ^haven't a stauncher ally than I am, and I
should only be too glad to be able to contradict.
But it's so difficult. I assure you I go out of
my way; talk to the most outrageous people,
deny the very possibility of Mr. Churchill's being
in any way implicated. One knows that it's im-
possible, but what can one do? I have said again
and again — ^to people like grocers' wives; even
to the grocers, for that matter — ^that Mr. Church-
ill is a statesman, and that if he insists that this

[242]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

odious man's railway must go through, it is in
the interests of the country that it should. I tell
them . . /'

She paused for a minute to take breath and
then went on : "I was speaking to a man of that
class only this morning, rather an intelligent
man and quite nice — I was saying, ' Don't you
see, my dear Mr. Tull, that it is a question of
international politics. If the grand duke does
not get the money for his railway, the grand duke
will be turned out of his — ^what is it — ^principal-
ity? And that would be most dangerous — ^in
the present condition of affairs over there, and
besides . . / The man listened very respect-
fully, but I could see that he was not convinced.
I buckled to again . . .

" ' And besides/ I $aid, ' there is the question
of Greenland itself. We English must have
Greenland . . . sooner or later. It touches
you, even. You have a son who's above — ^whb
doesn't care for life in a country tovm, and you
want to send him abroad — ^with a little capital
Well, Greenland is just the place for him.' The
man looked at me, and almost shook his head iiti
my face.

1^]

THE INHERITORS

" ' If you'll excuse me, my lady/ he said, ^ it
won't do. Mr. Churchill is a man above hocus-
pocus. Well I know it that have had dealings
with him. But • . . well, the long and the
short of it is, my lady, that you can't touch
pitch and not be defiled; or, leastwise, people'll
think you've been defiled — ^those that don't know
you. The foreign nations are all very well,
and the grand duchy — ^and the getting hold of
Greenland, but what touches me is this — My
neighbour Slingsby had a little money, and he
gets a prospectus. It looked very well — ^very
well — ^and he brings it in to me. I did not have
anything to do with it, but Slingsby did. Well,
now there's Slingsby on the rates and his wife a
lady born, almost. I might have been taken in
the same way but for — for the grace of God, I'm
minded to say. Well, Slingsby's a good man,
and used to be a hard-working man — ^all his life,
and now it turns out that that prospectus came
about by the man de Mersch's manoeuvres —
" wild-cat schemes," they call them in the paper
that I read. And there's any number of them
started by de Mersch or his agents. Just for
yrhat? That de Mersch may be the richest man

M44l

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

in the world and a philanthropist. Well, then,
Where's Slingsby, if that's philanthropy? So Mr.
Churchill comes along and says, in a manner of
speaking, " That's all very well, but this same Mr.
Mersch is the grand duke of somewhere or other,
and we must bolster him up in his kingdom, or
else there will be trouble with the powers."
Powers — ^what's powers to me?— or Greenland?
when there's Slingsby, a man I've smoked a pipe
with every market evening of my life, in the
workhouse? And there's hundreds of Slingsbya
all over the country.'

"The man was working himself — Slingsby
was a good sort of man. It shocked even me.
One knows what goes on in one's own village,
of course. And it's only too true that there's
hundreds of Slingsbys — I'm not boring you, am
I?"

I did not answer for a moment. " I — ^I had no
idea," I said; " I have been so long out of it and
over there one did not realise the . . . the
feeling."

"You've been well out of it," she answered;
" one has had to suffer, I assure you." I believed
that she had had to suffer; it must have taken

[245]

THE INHERITORS

a good deal to make that lady complain. Her
large, ruddy features followed the droop of her
eyes down to the fringe of the parasol that she
was touching the turf with. We were sitting on
garden seats in the dappled shade of enormous
elms.

There was in the air a touch of the sounds dis-
coursed by a yeomanry band at the other end of
the grounds. One could see the red of their uni-
forms through moving rifts in the crowd of white
dresses.

" That wasn't even the worst," she said sud-
denly, lifting her eyes and looking away between
the trunks of the trees. "The man has been
reading the papers and he gave me the benefit
of his reflections. * Someone's got to be pun-
ished for this; ' he said, ' we've got to show them
that you can't be hand-and-glove with that sort
of blackguard without paying for it. I don't
say, mind you, that Mr, Churchill i« or ever
has been. I know him, and I trust him. But
there's more than me in the world, and they can't
all know him. Well, here's the papers saying —
or they don't say it, but they hint, which is
worse in a way — ^that he must be, or he wouldn't

[246]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

stick up for the man. They say the man's a
blackguard out and out — ^in Greenland too ; has
the blacks murdered. Churchill says the blacks
are to be safe-guarded, that's the word. Well,
they may be — but so ought Slingsby to have
been, yet it didn't help him. No, my lady, we've
got to put our own house in order and that first,
before thinking of the powers or places like
Greenland. What's the good of the saner policy
that Mr. Churchill talks about, if you can't trust
anyone with your money, and have to live on
the capital ? If you can't sleep at night for think-
ing that you may be in the workhouse to-mor-
row — like Slingsby.'^ The first duty of men in
Mr. Churchill's position — ^as I see it — is to see
that we're able to be confident of honest deal-
ing. That's what we want, not Greenlands.
That's how we all feel, and you know it, too, or
else you, a great lady, wouldn't stop to talk to
a man like me. And, mind you, I'm true blue,
always have been and always shall be, and, if it
was a matter of votes, I'd give mine to Mr.
Churchill to-morrow. But there's a many that
wouldn't, and there's a many that believe the
hintings.' "

[247I

THE INHERITORS

My lady stopped and sighed from a broad
bosom. "What could I say?" she went on
again. " I know Mr. Churchill and I like him
— ^and everyone that knows him likes him. I'm
one of the stalwarts, mind you; I'm not for giv-
ing in to popular clamour; I'm for the ' saner
policy/ like Churchill. But, as the man said:
* There's a many that believe the hintings.' And
I almost wish Churchill . . . However, you
understand what I meant when I said that one
had had to suffer."

" Oh, I understand," I said. I was beginning
to. " And Churchill? " I asked later, " he gives
no sign of relenting? "

" Would you have him? " she asked sharply;
" would you make him if you could? " She had
an air of challenging. ** I'm for the ' saner
policy ! ' cost what it may. He owes it to him-
self to sacrifice himself, if it comes to that."

" I'm with you too," I answered, " over boot
and spur." Her enthusiasm was contagious, and
unnecessary.

" Oh, he'll stick," she began again after con-
sultation with the parasol fringe. " You'll hear
him after a minute. It's a field day to-day.

[248]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

You'll miss the other heavy guns if you stop with
me. I do it ostentatiously — ^wait until they've
done. They're all trembling; all of them. My
husband will be on the platform — trembling too.
He is a type of them. All day long and at odd
moments at night I talk to him — out-talk him
and silence him. What's the state of popular
feeling to him? He's for the country, not the
town — ^this sort of thing has nothing to do with
him. It's a matter to be settled by Jews in the
City. Well, he sees it at night, and then in the
morning the papers undo all my work. He
begins to talk about his seat — ^which / got for
him. I've been the ' voice of the county ' for
years now. Well, it'll soon be a voice without
a county . . . What is ft? *The old order
changeth.' So, I've arranged it that I shall wait
until the trembling big-wigs have stuttered their
speeches out, and then I'm going to sail down
the centre aisle and listen to Churchill with vis-
ible signs of approval. It won't do much to-
day, but there was a time when it would have
changed the course of an election . . . Ah,
there's Effie's young man. It's time."
She rose and marched, with the air of going to

THE INHERITORS

a last sacrifice, across the deserted sward toward
a young man who was passing under the calico
flag of the gateway.

" It's all right, Willoughby," she said, as we
drew level, " I've found someone else to face the
music with me; you can go back to Effie." A
bronzed and grateful young man murmurecl
thanks to me.

" It's an awful relief, Granger," he said; " can't
think how you can do it. I'm hooked, but
you . . ."

" He's the better man," his mother-in-law-elect
said, over her shoulder. She sailed slowly up the
aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a
matron. " Splendidly timed, you see," she said,
"do you observe my husband's embarrass-
ment? "

It was splendid to see Churchill again, stand-
ing there negligently, with the diffidence oi a
boy amid the bustle of applause. I understood
suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man
with the delicate, almost grotesque, mannerisms.
He appealed to me by sheer force of picturesque*
ness, appealed as some forgotten mediaeval city
might. I was concerned for him as for some

[250]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

such dying place, standing above the level plains;
I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its
glory, of its renown. He advocated his sanef
policy before all those people; stood up there
and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress
of emotion, without more movement than an
occasional flutter of the glasses he held in his
hand. One would never have recognised that
the thing was a fighting speech but for the oc-
casional shiver of his audience. They were think-
ing of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly,
to treat them as rational people.

It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by
that wall of people all of one type, of one idea;
the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force
of which they knew nothing was dragging them
forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevaisse.
They wanted to get back, were struggling, pant-
ing even — ^as a nation pants — ^to get back by
their own way that they understood and saw;
were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the
weighted rope that was dragging them forward.
Churchill stood up there and repeated : " Mine is
the only way — the saner policy," and his words
would fly all over the country to fall upon the

[251]

THE INHERITORS

deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not
understand the use of calmness, of trifling even,
in the face of danger, who suspected the calm-
ness as one suspects the thing one has not. At
the end of it I received his summons to a small
door at the back of the building. The speech
seemed to have passed out of his mind far more
than out of mine.

" So you have come," he said; " that's good,
and so . . • Let us walk a little way . .
. out of this. My^ aunt will pick us up on the
road." He linked his arm into mine and pro-
pelled me swiftly down the bright, broad street.
" Fm sorry you came in for that, but—one has
to do these things."

There was a sort of resisted numbness in his
voice, a lack of any resiliency. My heart sank
a little. It was as if I were beside an invalid
who did not— must not — ^know his condition;
as if I were pledged not to notice anything.
In the open the change struck home as a ham-
mer strikes; in the pitiless searching of the un-
restrained light, his grayness, his tremulousness,
his aloofness from the things about him, came
home to me like a pang.

[252I

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

" You look a bit fagged," I said, " perhaps we
ought not to talk about work." His thoughts
seemed to come back from a great distance, oh,
from an infinite distance beyond the horizon, the
soft hills of that fat country. " You want rest,"
I added.

" I-*-oh, no," he answered, " I can't have it .
. . till the end of the session. Fm used to it
toa"

He began talking briskly about the *' Crom-
well; " proofs had emerged from the infinite and
wanted attention. There were innumerable lit-
tle matters, things to be copied for the appendix
and revisions. It was impossible for me to keep
my mind upon them.

It had come suddenly home to me that this was
the world that I belonged to; that I had come
back to it as if from an under world; that to this
I owed allegiance. She herself had recognised
that; she herself had bidden me tell him what
was a-gate against him. It was a duty too; he
was my friend. But, face to face with him, it
became almost an impossibility. It was impossi-
ble even to put it into words. The mere ideas
seemed to be untranslatable, to savour of mad-

[253]

THE INHERITORS

ness. I found myself in the very position that she
had occupied at the commencement of our rela-
tions : that of having to explain — say, to a Persian
— ^the working principles of the telegraph. And
I was not equal to the task. At the same time I
had to do something. I had to. It would be
abominable to have to go through life forever,
alone with the consciousness of that sort of treach-
ery of silence. But how could I tell him even the
comprehensibles? What kind of sentence was I
to open with? With pluckings of an apologetic
string, without prelude at all — or how? I grew
conscious that there was need for haste; he was
looking behind him down the long white road for
the carriage that was to pick us up.

" My dear fellow . . ."I began. He must
have noted a change in my tone, and looked at
me with suddenly lifted eyebrows. " You know
my sister is going to marry Mr. Gurnard."

"Why, no," he answered — "that is . . .
I've heard . • ." he began to offer good
wishes.

" No, no," I interrupted him hurriedly, " not
that. But I happen to know that Gurnard is
meditating ... is going to separate from

[254]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

you in public matters." An expression of dismay
spread over his face.

" My dear fellow/' he began.

*' Oh, Fm not drunk," I said bitterly, " but I've
been behind the scenes — for a long time. And I
could not . . . couldn't let the thing go on
without a word."

He stopped in the road and looked at me.

" Yes, yes," he said, " I daresay . . . But
what does it lead to? . . . Even if I could
listen to you — I can't go behind the scenes. Mr.
Gurnard may differ from me in points, but don't
you see? . . ." He had walked on slowly,
but he came to a halt again. " We had better put
these matters out of our minds. Of course you
are not drunk; but one is tied down in these mat-
ters . . ."

He spoke very gently, as if he did not wish to
offend me by this closing of the door. He
seemed suddenly to grow very old and very gray.
Thdre was a stile in the dusty hedge-row, and he
walked toward it, meditating. In a moment he
looked back at me. " I had forgotten," he said;
" I meant to suggest that we should wait here
—I am a little tired." He perched himself on

[255]

THE INHERITORS

the top bar and became lost in the inspection of
the cord of his glasses. I went toward him.

" I knew," I said, " that you could not listen
to . . . to the sort of thing. But there were
reasons. I felt forced. You will forgive me."
He looked up at me^ starting as if he had forgot-
ten my presence.

" Yes, yes," he said, " I have a certain — ^I can't
think of the right word — ^say respect — for your
judgment and — and motives . . . But you
see, there are, for instance, my colleagues. I
couldn't go to them . . ." He lost the
thread of his idea.

" To tell the truth," I said, with a sudden im-
pulse for candour, '' it isn't the political aspect of
the matter, but the personal. I spoke because
it was just possible that I might be of service to
you — ^personally — ^and because I would like you
. . . to make a good fight for it." I had
borrowed her own words.

He looked up at me and smiled. *' Thank
you," he said. " I believe you think it's a losing
game," he added, with a touch of gray humour
that was like a genial hour of sunlight on a win-
try day, I did not answer. A little way down

[256]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

the road Miss ChurchiU's carriage whirled into
sight, sparkling in the sunlight, and sending up
an attendant cloud of dust that melted like
smoke through the dog-roses of the leeward
hedge.

" So you don't think much of me as a politi-
cian," Churchill suddenly deduced smilingly.
" You had better not tell that to my aunt."

I went up to town with Churchill that evening.
There was nothing waiting for me there, but I
did not want to think. I wanted to be among
men, among crowds of men, to be dazed, to be
stupefied, to hear nothing for the din of life, to
be blinded by the blaze of lights.

There were plenty of people in Churchill's car-
riage; a military member and a local member
happened to be in my immediate neighbourhood.
Their minds were full of the financial scandals,
and they dinned their alternating opinions into
me. I assured them that I knew nothing about
the matter, and they grew more solicitous for my
enlightenment.

" It all comes from having too many eggs in
one basket," the local member summed up.
''The old-fashioned small enterprises had their

[257I

THE INHERITORS

disadvantages, but — ^mind you — ^these gigantic
trusts . . . Isn't that so, General? "

" Oh, I quite agree with you," the general
barked; "at the same time . . /' Their
voices sounded on, intermingling, indistinguish-
able, soothing even. I seemed to be listening to
the hum of a threshing-machine — a passage of
sound booming on one note, a passage, a half-
tone higher, and so on, and so on. Visible things
grew hazy, fused into one another.

r 258 )

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

WE reached London somewhat late in
the evening — in the twilight of a sum-
mer day. There was the hurry and
bustle of arrival, a hurry and bustle that changed
the tenor of my thoughts and broke their train.
As I stood reflecting before the door of the
carriage, I felt a friendly pressure of a hand on
my shoulder.

" You'll see to that," Churchill's voice said in
my ear. " You'll set the copyists to work."

" m go to the Museum to-morrow," I said.
There were certain extracts to be made for the
''Life of Cromwell^' — extracts from pamphlets
that we had not conveniently at disposal. He
nodded, walked swiftly toward his brougham,
opened the door and entered.

I remember so well that last sight of him— -of
his long, slim figure bending down for the en-
trance, woefully solitary, woefully weighted; re-
member so well the gleam of the carriage panels
reflecting the murky light of the bare London

[259]

THE INHERITORS

terminus, the attitude of the coachman stiffly
reining back the horse; the thin hand that
reached out, a gleam of white, to turn the gleam-
ing handle. There was something intimately
suggestive of the man in the motion of that hand»
in its tentative outstretching, its gentle, half-per-
suasive — ^almost theoretic — ^grasp of the handle.
The pleasure of its friendly pressure on my shoul-
der carried me over some minutes of solitude;
its weight on my body removing another from
my mind. I had feared that my ineffective dis-
closure had chilled what of regard he had for me.
He had said nothing, his manner had said noth-
ing, but I had feared. In the railway carriage
he had sat remote from me, buried in papers.
But that touch on my shoulder was enough to
set me well with myself again, if not to afford
scope for pleasant improvisation. It at least
showed me that he bore me no ill-will, otherwise
he would hardly have touched me. Perhaps,
even, he was grateful to me, not for service, but
for ineffectual good-will. Whatever I read into
it, that was the last time he spoke to me, and the
last time he touched me. And I loved him very
well. Things went so quickly after that,

la6oJ

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In a moderately cheerful frame of mind I
strolled the few yards that separated me from my
club— intent on dining. In my averseness to soli-
tude I sat down at a table where sat already a little,
bald-headed, false-toothed Anglo-Indian, a man
who bored me into fits of nervous excitement.
He was by way of being an incredibly distant
uncle of my own. As a rule I avoided him, to-
night I dined with him. He was a person of
interminable and incredibly inaccurate reminis-
cences. His long residence in an indigo-produc-
ing swamp had affected his memory, which was
supported by only very occasional visits to
England.

He told me tales of my poor father and of my
poor, dear mother, and of Mr. Bromptons and
Mrs. Kenwards who had figured on their visit-
ing lists away back in the musty sixties.

" Your poor, dear father was precious badly
off then," he said; " he had a hard struggle for
it. I had a bad time of it too; worm had got at
all my plantations, so I couldn't help him, poor
chap. I think, mind you, Kenny Granger treat-
ed him very badly. He might have done some-
thing for him — ^he had influence, Kenny had."

[261]

it

THE INHERITORS

Kenny was my uncle, the head of the family,
the husband of my aunt.

" They weren't on terms," I said.
Oh, I know, I know," the old man mumbled,

but still, for one's only brother . . . How-
ever, you contrive to do yourselves pretty well.
You're making your pile, aren't you? Someone
said to me the other day — can't remember who it
was — that you were quite one of the rising men
—quite one of the men."

Very kind of someone," I said.
And now I see," he went on, lifting up a copy
of a morning paper, over which I had found him
munching his salmon cutlet, " now I see your
sister is going to marry a cabinet minister.
Ah ! " he shook his poor, muddled, baked head,
" I remember you both as tiny little dots."

"Why," I said, "she can hardly have been
born then."

" Oh, yes," he affirmed, " that was when I came
over in '78. She remembered, too, that I
brought her over an ivory doll — she remem-
bered."

" You have seen her? " I asked.

" Oh, I called two or three weeks — ^no, months

[262]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

—ago. She's the image of your poor, dear
mother/' he added, "at that age; I remarked
upon it to your aunt, but, of course, she could not
remember. They were not married until after the
quarrel"

A sudden restlessness made me bolt the rest
of my tepid dinner. With my return to the up-
per world, and the return to me of a will, despair
of a sort had come back. I had before me the
problem — ^the necessity — of winning her. Once
I was out of contact with her she grew smaller,
less of an idea, more of a person — that one could
win. And there were two ways. I must either
woo her as one woos a person barred; must com-
pel her to take flight, to abandon, to cast away
everything; or I must go to her as an eligible
suitor with the Etchingham acres and possibili-
ties of a future on that basis. This fantastic old
man with his mumbled reminiscences spoilt me
for the last. One remembers sooner or later
that a county-man may not marry his reputed
sister without scandal. And I craved her in-
tensely.

She had upon me the effect of an incredible
stimulant; away from her I was like a drunkarc/

[263]

THE INHERITORS

cut off from his liquor; an opium-taker from his
drug. I hardly existed ; I hardly thought.

I had an errand at my aunt's house; had a
message to deliver, sympathetic enquiries to
make — ^and I wanted to see her, to gain some
sort of information from her; to spy out the land;
to ask her for terms. There was a change in the
appearance of the house, an adventitious bright-
ness that indicated the rise in the fortunes of the
family. For me the house was empty and the
great door closed hollowly behind me. My sister
was not at home. It seemed abominable to me
that she should be out; that she could be talking
to anyone, or could exist without me. I went
sullenly across the road to the palings of the
square. As I turned the corner I found my head
pivoting on my neck. I was looking over my
shoulder at the face of the house, waswondering
which was her window.

" Like a love-sick boy — like a damn love-sick
boy," I growled at myself. My sense of humour
was returning to me. There began a pilgfrimage
in search of companionship.

London was a desert more solitary than was
believable. On those brilliant summer even-

[264]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ings the streets were crowded, were alive, bustled
with the chitter-chatter of footsteps, with the
chitter-chatter of voices, of laughter.

It was impossible to walk, impossible to do
more than tread on one's own toes; one was al-
most blinded by the constant passing of faces. It
was like being in a wheat-field with one's eyes on
a level with the indistinguishable ears. One was
alone in one's intense contempt for all these faces,
all these contented faces; one towered intellect-
ually above them; one towered into regions of
rarefaction. And down below they enjoyed
themselves. One understood life better; they
better how to live. That struck me then — in Ox-
ford Street. There was the intense good-hu-
mour, the absolute disregard of the minor incon-
veniences, of the inconveniences of a crowd, of
the ignominy of being one of a crowd. There
was the intense poetry of the soft light, the poetry
of the summer-night coolness, and they under-
stood how to enjoy it. I turned up an ancient
court near Bedford Row.

" In the name of God," I said, " I will enjoy
. . ." and I did. The poetry of those old de-
serted quarters came suddenly home to me — ^all

I265]

THE INHERITORS

the little commonplace thoughts; all the com*
monplace associations of Georgian London.
For the time I was done with the meanings of
things.

I was seeking Lea — ^he was not at home. The
quarter was honeycombed with the homes of peo-
ple one knows; of people one used to know, ex-
cellent young men who wrote for the papers,
who sub-edited papers, who designed posters,
who were always just the same. One forgot them
for a year or two, one came across them again
and found them just the same — still writing for
the same papers, still sub-editing the same pa-
pers, designing the same posters. I was in the
mood to rediscover them in the privacies of their
hearths, with the same excellent wives making
fair copies of the same manuscripts, with the same
gaiety of the same indifferent whiskey, brown or
pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy, square, cut-
glass stoppered decanters, and with the same in-
different Virginian tobacco at the same level in
the same jars.

I was in the mood for this stability, for the
excellent household article that was their view
of life and literature. I wanted to see it again,

[266]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

to hear again how it was filling the unvarying,
allotted columns of the daily, the weekly, or the
monthly journals. I wanted to breathe again
this mild atmosphere where there are no longer
hopes or fears. But, alas! . . .

I rang bell after bell of that gloomy central
London district. You know what happens.
One pulls the knob under the name of the person
one seeks — ^puUs it three, or, it may be, four times
in vain. One rings the housekeeper's bell; it re-
verberates, growing fainter and fainter, gradu-
ally stifled by a cavernous subterranean at-
mosphere. After an age a head peeps round the
opening door, the head of a hopeless. anachron-
ism, the head of a widow of early Victorian merit,
or of an orphan of incredible age. One asks for
So-and-so— he's out; for Williams — ^he's expect-
ing an increase of family, and has gone into the
country with madame. And Waring? Oh, he's
gone no one knows where, and Johnson who used
to live at Number 44 only comes up to town on
Tuesdays now. I exhausted the possibilities of
that part of Bloomsbury, the possibilities of va-
riety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of
London divided itself into bands — ^into zones.

[267]

THE INHERITORS

Between here and Kensington the people that I
knew could not be called on after dinner, those
who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyper-
borean — one was bound by the exigencies of
time. It was ten o'clock as I stood reflecting on
a doorstep — on Johnson's doorstep. I must see
somebody, must talk to somebody, before I went
to bed in the cheerless room at the club. It was
true I might find a political stalwart in the smok-
ing-room — but that was a last resort, a desperate
and ignominious pis aller.

There was Fox, I should find him at the office.
But it needed a change of tone before I could
contemplate with equanimity the meeting of that
individual. I had been preparing myself to con-
front all the ethically excellent young men and
Fox was, ethically speaking, far from excellent,
middle-aged, rubicund, leery — sl free lance of
genius. I made the necessary change in my
tone of mind and ran him to earth.

The Watteau room was further enlivened by
the introduction of a scarlet plush couch of
sumptuous design. By its side stood a couple of
electric lights. The virulent green of their
shades made the colours of the be-shepherded

[268]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

wall-panels appear almost unearthly, and threw
impossible shadows on the deal partition. Round
the couch stood chairs with piles of papers neatly
arranged on them; round it, on the floor, were
more papers lying like the leaves of autumn that
one sings of. On it lay Fox, enveloped in a
Shetland shawl — a, good shawl that was the only
honest piece of workmanship in the tom-tawdry
place. Fox was as rubicund as ever, but his
features were noticeably peaked and there were
heavy lines under his eyes — lines cast into deep
shadow by the light by which he was reading.
I entered unannounced, and was greeted by an
indifferent upward glance that changed into one
of something like pleasure as he made out my
features in the dim light.

" Hullo, you old country hawbuck," he said,
with spasmodic jocularity; " I'm uncommon glad
to see you." He came to a jerky close, with an
indrawing of his breath. " I'm about done," he
went on. " Same old thing — ^sciatica. Took me
just after I got here this afternoon; sent out one
of the messengers to buy me a sofa, and here
I've been ever since. Well, and what's brought
you up — don't answer, I know all about it. I've

[269]

THE INHERITORS

got to keep on talking until this particular spasm's
over, or else I shall scream and disturb the flow
of Soane's leader. Well, and now youVe come,
you'll stop and help me to put the Hour to bed,
won't you? And then you can come and put me
to bed."

He went on talking at high pressure, exag-
gerating his expressions, heightening his humor-
ous touches with punctuations of rather wild
laughter. At last he came to a stop with a half
suppressed " Ah! " and a long indrawing of the
breath.

" That's over," he said. " Give me a drop of
brandy — there's a good fellow." I gave him his
nip. Then I explained to him that I couldn't
work for the Hour; that I wasn't on terms with
de Mersch.

" Been dropping money over him? " he asked,
cheerfully. I explained a little more — ^that there
was a lady.

" Oh, it's tJtat," Fox said. " The man is a
fool . . . But anyhow Mersch don't count
for much in this particular show. He's no money
in it even, so you may put your pride in your
pocket, or wherever you keep it. It's all right
Straight. He's only the small change."

[270]

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

But/' I said, " everyone says; you said your-

" X>Ul, J.

self . . ."

To be sure," he answered. " But you don't
think that / play second fiddle to a bounder of
that calibre. Not really? "

He looked at me with a certain seriousness.
I remembered, as I had remembered once before,
that Fox was a personality — z power. I had never
realised till then how entirely — fundamentally — i
different he was from any other man that I knew^
He was surprising enough to have belonged to
another race. He looked at me, not as if he cared
whether I gave him his due or no, but as if he were
astonished at my want of perception of the fact.
He let his towzled head fall back upon the plush
cushions. " You might kick him from here to
Greenland for me," he said; "I wouldn't weep.
It suits me to hold him up, and a kicking might
restore his equilibrium. I'm sick of him — I've
told him so. I knew there was a woman. But
don't you worry; Pm the man here."

" If that's the case ..." I said.

" Oh, that's it," he answered.

I helped him to put the paper to bed; took
some of the work oflf his hands. It was all part
of the getting back to life; of the resuming of

[271]

THE INHERITORS

rusty armour; and I wanted to pass the night.
I was not unused to it, as it happened. Fox had
had several of these fits during my year, and dur-
ing most of them I had helped him through the
night; once or twice for three on end. Once I
had had entire control for a matter of five nights.
But they gave me a new idea of Fox, those two
or three weird hours that night. It was as if I
had never seen him before. The attacks grew
more virulent as the night advanced. He groaned
and raved, and said things — oh, the most as-
tounding things in gibberish that upset one's
nerves and everything else. At the height he
sang hymns, and then, as the fits passed, relapsed
into incredible clear-headedness. It gave me, I
say, a new idea of Fox. It was as if, for all the
time I had known him, he had been playing a part,
and that only now, in the delirium of his pain,
in the madness into which he drank himself, were
fragments of the real man thrown to the surface.
I grew, at last, almost afraid to be alone with
him in the dead small hours of the morning, and
longed for the time when I could go to bed among
the uninspiring, marble-topped furniture of my
club.

[272]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

AT noon of the next day I gave Fox his
look in at his own flat. He was stretched
^ upon a sofa — ^it was evident that I was
to take such of his duties as were takeable. He
greeted me with words to that effect.

" Don't go filling the paper with your un-
breeched geniuses," he said, genially, " and don't
overwork yourself. There's really nothing to do,
but you're being there will keep that little beast
Evans from getting too cock-a-hoop. He'd like
to jerk me out altogether; thinks they'd get on
just as well without me."

I expressed in my manner general contempt
for Evans, and was taking my leave.

" Oh, and — " Fox called after me. I turned
back. " The Greenland mail ought to be in to-
day. If Callan's contrived to get his flood-gates
open, run his stuff in, there's a good chap. It's
a feature and all that, you know."

'^ I suppose Soane's to have a look at it>" I
asked.

[273]

THE INHERITORS

" Oh, yes," he answered; " but tell him to keep
strictly to old Cal's lines — ^rub that into him. If
he were to get drunk and run in some of his own
tips it'd be awkward. People are expecting Cal's
stuff. Tell you what: you take him out to lunch,
eh? Keep an eye on the supplies, and ram it
into him that he's got to stick to Cal's line of
argument."

*' Soane's as bad as ever, then? " I asked.

" Oh," Fox answered, " he'll be all right for
the stuff If you get that one idea into him." A
prolonged and acute fit of pain seized him. I
fetched his man and left him to his rest.

At the office of the Hour I was greeted by the
handing to me of a proof of Callan's manuscript.
Evans, the man across the screen, was the imme*
diate agent.

'' I suppose it's got to go in, so I had it set
up," he said.

" Oh, of course it's got to go in," I answered.
" It's to go to Soane first, though."

" Soane's not here yet," he answered. I noted
the tone of sub-acid pleasure in his voice. Evans
would have enjoyed a fiasco.

" Oh, well," I answered, nonchalantly, " there's

[274]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

plenty of time. You allow space on those lines.
I'll send round to hunt Soane up."

I felt called to be upon my mettle. I didn't
much care about the paper^ but I had a definite
antipathy to being done by Evans — ^by a mad
Welshman in a stubborn fit. I knew what was
going to happen; knew that Evans would feign
inconceivable stupidity, the sort of black stupid-
ity that is at command of individuals of his
primitive race. I was in for a day of petty wor-
ries. In the circumstances it was a thing to be
thankful for; it dragged my mind away from
larger issues. One has no time for brooding
when one is driving a horse in a jibbing fit.

Evans was grimly conscious that I was mod-
erately ignorant of technical details; he kept
them well before my eyes all day long.

At odd moments I tried to read Callan's arti-
cle. It was impossible. It opened with a de-
scription of the squalor of the Greenlander's life,
and contained tawdry passages of local colour.

I knew what was coming. This was the view
of the Greenlanders of pre-Merschian Greenland,
elaborated, after the manner of Callan — the Spe-
cial Commissioner — so as to bring out the glory

[2751

THE INHERITORS

and virtue of the work of regeneration. Then in
a gush of superlatives the work itself would be
described. I knew quite well what was coming,
and was temperamentally unable to read more
than the first ten lines.

Everything was going wrong. The printers
developed one of their sudden crazes for asking
idiotic questions. Their messengers came to
Evans, Evans sent them round the pitch-pine
screen to me. " Mr. Jackson wants to know

99

The fourth of the messengers that I had de-
spatched to Soane returned with the news that
Soane would arrive at half-past nine. I sent out
in search of the strongest coffee that the city
afforded. Soane arrived. He had been ill, he
said, very ill. He desired to be fortified with
champagne. I produced the coffee.

Soane was the son of an Irish peer. He had
magnificent features — ^a little blurred nowadays
— ^and a remainder of the grand manner. His
nose was a marvel of classic workmanship, but
the floods of time had reddened and speckled it
— not offensively, but ironically; his hair was
turning grey, his eyes were bloodshot, his heavy

[276]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

moustache rather ragged. He inspired one with
the respect that one feels for a man who has lived
and does not care a curse. He had a weird inter-
mittent genius that made it worth Fox's while
to put up with his lapses and his brutal snubs.

I produced the coffee and pointed to the sofa
of the night before,

" Damn it," he said, " I'm ill, I teU you; I
want . . ."

" Exactly ! " I cut in. " You want a rest, old
fellow*. Here's Cal's article. We want some-
thing special about it. If you don't feel up to it
I'll send round to Jenkins."

" Damn Jenkins," he said; " I'm up to it."

"You understand," I said, "you're to write
strictly on Callan's lines. Don't insert any in-
formation from extraneous sources. And make
it as slashing as you like— on those lines."

He grunted in acquiescence. I left him lying
on the sofa, drinking the coffee. I had tenderly
arranged the lights for him as Fox had arranged
them the night before. As I went out to get
my dinner I was comfortably aware of him, hold-
ing the slips close to his muddled eyes and philo-
sophically damning the nature of things.

THE INHERITORS

When I returned, Soane, from his sofa, said
something that I did not catch — ^something about
Callan and his article.

" Oh, for God's sake," I answered, " don't
worry me. Have some more coffee and stick to
Cal's line of argument. That's what Fox said.
I'm not responsible."

" Deuced queer," Soane muttered. He began
to scribble with a pencil. From the tone of his
voice I knew that he had reached the precise
stage at which something brilliant — ^the real thing
of its kind — might be expected.

Very late Soane finished his leader. He looked
up as he wrote the last word.

" I've got it written," he said. " But . . .
I say, what the deuce is up? It's like being a tall
clock with the mainspring breaking, this."

I rang the bell for someone to take the copy
down.

" Your metaphor's too much for me, Soane,"
I said.

" It's appropriate all the way along," he main-
tained, " if you call me a mainspring. I've been
wound up and wound up to write old de Mersch
and his Greenland up — ^and it's been a tight

[278I

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

wind, these days, I tell you. Then all of a
sudden . . ."

A boy appeared and carried off the copy.

" All of a sudden," Soane resumed, " some-
thing gives — I suppose something's given — and
there's a whirr-rr-rr and the hands fly backwards
and old de Mersch and Greenland bump to the
bottom, like the weights."

The boom of the great presses was rattling the
window frames. Soane got up and walked to-
ward one of the cupboards.

" Dry work," he said; ** but the simile's just,
isn't it? "

I gave one swift step toward the bell-button
beside the desk. The proof of Callan's article,
from which Soane had been writing, lay a
crumpled white streamer on the brown wood of
Fox's desk. I made toward it. As I stretched
out my hand the solution slipped into my mind,
coming with no more noise than that of a bullet ;
impinging with all the shock and remaining with
all the pain. I had remembered the morning,
over there in Paris, when she had told me that she
had invited one of de Mersch's lieutenants to be-
tray him by not concealing from Callan the real

[279]

THE INHERITORS

horrors of the Systeme Groenlandais — flogged,
butchered, miserable natives, the famines, the
vices, diseases, and the crimes. There came sud-
denly before my eyes the tall narrow room in my
aunt's house, the opening of the door and her en-
try, followed by that of the woebegone governor
of a province — the man who was to show Callan
things — with his grating " Cest entendu . . ."
I remembered the scene distinctly; her words;
her looks; my utter unbelief. I remembered, too,
that it had not saved me from a momentary
sense of revolt against that inflexible intention
of a treachery which was to be another step
toward the inheritance of the earth. I had re-
jected the very idea, and here it had come; it
was confronting me with all its meaning and con-
sequences. Callan had been shown things he had
not been meant to see, and had written the truth
as he had seen it. His article was a small thing
in itself, but he had been sent out there with tre-
mendous flourishes of de Mersch's trumpets. * He
was the man who could be believed. De Mersch's
supporters had practically said: " If he con-
demns us we are indeed damned." And now that
the condemnation had come, it meant ruin, as it

[280]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

seemed to me, for everybody I had known,
worked for, seen, or heard of, during the last year
of my life. It was ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for
the ministers, and for the men who talk in railway
carriages, for shopkeepers and for the Govern-
ment; it was a menace to the institutions which
hold us to the past, that are our guarantees for the
future. The safety of everything one respected
and believed in was involved in the disclosure of
an atrocious fraud, and the disclosure was in my
hands. For that night I had the power of the
press in my keeping. People were waiting for
this pronouncement. De Mersch's last card was ^
his philanthropy; his model state and his happy
natives.

The drone of the presses made the floor under
my feet quiver, and the whole building vibrated
as if the earth itself had trembled. I was alone
with my knowledge. Did she know; had she
put the power in my hand? But I was alone,

and I was free.

#

I took up the proof and began to read, slant-
ing the page to the fall of the light. It was a
phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhct*
oric of the man there was genuine indignation

1281]

THE INHERITORS

and pain. There were revolting details of cruelty
to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there
were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked;
but more revolting to see without a mask was
that falsehood which had been hiding under the
words that for ages had spurred men to noble
deeds, to self-sacrifice, to heroism. What was
appalling was the sudden perception that all
the traditional ideals of honour, glory, consci-
ence, had been committed to the upholding of a
gigantic and atrocious fraud. The falsehood had
spread stealthily, had eaten into the very heart
of creeds and convictions that we lean upon on
our passage between the past and the future.
The old order of things had to live or perish with
a lie. I saw all this with the intensity and clear-
ness of a revelation ; I saw it as though I had been
asleep through a year of work and dreams, and
had awakened to the truth. I saw it all; I saw
her intention. What was I to do?

Without my marking its approach emotion
was upon me. The fingers that held up the ex-
tended slips tattooed one on another through its
negligible thickness.

" Pretty thick that," Soanc said. He was look-

I282]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ing back at me from the cupboard he had opened.
" I've rubbed it in, too . . . there'll be hats
on the green to-morrow." He had his head in-
side the cupboard, and his voice came to me
hollowly. He extracted a large bottle with a gilt-
foiled neck.

" Won't it upset the apple cart to-morrow/*
he said, very loudly; " won't it? "

His voice acted on me as the slight shake upon
a phial full of waiting chemicals; crystallised
them suddenly with a little click. Everything
suddenly grew very clear to me. I suddenly
understood that all the tortuous intrigue hinged
upon what I did in the next few minutes. It
rested with me now to stretch out my hand to
that button in the wall or to let the whole world —
" the . . . the probity . . . that sort of
thing," she had said — ^fall to pieces. The drone
of the presses continued to make itself felt like
the quiver of a suppressed emotion. I might
stop them or I might not. It rested with
me.

Everybody was in my hands; they were quite
small. If I let the thing go on, they would be
done for utterly, and the new era would begin.

[283]

THE INHERITORS

Soane had got hold of a couple of long-stalked
glasses. They clinked together whilst he
searched the cupboard for something.

" Eh, what? " he said. " It is pretty strong,
isn't it? Ought to shake out some of the sup-
porters, eh? Bill comes on to-morrow . . •
do for that, I should think." He wanted a cork-
screw very badly.

But that was precisely it — ^it would " shake out
some of the supporters," and give Gurnard his
patent excuse. Churchill, I knew, would stick to
his line, the saner policy. But so many of the
men who had stuck to Churchill would fall away
now, and Gurnard, of course, would lead them to
his own triumph.

It was a criminal verdict. Callan had gone out
as a commissioner — with a good deal of drum-
beating. And this was his report, this shriek.
If it sounded across the house-tops — if I let it —
good-by to the saner policy and to Churchill. It
did not make any difference that Churchill's was
the saner policy, because there was no one in the
nation sane enough to see it. They wanted pu-
rity in high places, and here was a definite, crim-
inal indictment against de Mersch. And dc

I284I

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mersch would — in a manner of speaking, have to
be lynched, policy or no policy.

She wanted this, and in all the earth she was
the only desirable thing. If I thwarted her — she
would . . . what would she do now? I
looked at Soane.

" What would happen if I stopped the
presses? " I asked. Soane was twisting his cork-
screw in the wire of the champagne bottle.

It was fatal; I could see nothing on earth but
her. What else was there in the world. Wine?
The light of the sun? The wind on the heath?
Honour! My God, what was honour to me if I
could see nothing but her on earth? Would
honour or wine or sun or wind ever give me what
she could give? Let them go.

" What would happen if what? " Soane grum-
bled, '' D— fi this wire."

" Oh, I was thinking about something," I an-
swered. The wire gave with a little snap and he
began to ease the cork. Was I to let the light
pass me by for the sake of ... of Fox, for
instance, who trusted me? Well, let Fox go.
And Churchill and what Churchill stood for; the
probity; the greatness and the spirit of the past

THE INHERITORS

from which had sprung my conscience and the
consciences of the sleeping millions around me
— the woman at the poultry show with her
farmers and shopkeepers. Let them go too.

Soane put into my hand one of his charged
glasses. He seemed to rise out of the infinite, a
forgotten shape. I sat down at the desk opposite
him.

" Deuced good idea," he said, suddenly, ** to
stop the confounded presses and spoof old Fox.
He's up to some devilry. And, by Jove, I'd like
to get my knife in him; Jove, I would. And
then chuck up everything and leave for the Sand-
wich Islands. I'm sick of this life, this dog's life.
. . . One might have made a pile though, if
one'd known this smash was coming. But one
can't get at the innards of things. — No such luck
— no such luck, eh? " I looked at him stupidly;
took in his blood-shot eyes and his ruffled griz-
zling hair. I wondered who he was. " // s^agis-
salt rf^ . . . ? " I seemed to be back in Paris,
I couldn't think of what I had been thinking of.
I drank his glass of wine and he filled me another,
I drank that too.

Ah y€s--even then the thing wasn't settled^

[286]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

even now that I had recognized that Fox and
the others were of no account . . . What re-
mained was to prove to her that I wasn't a mere
chattel, a piece in the game. I was at the very
heart of the thing. After all, it was chance that
had put me there, the blind chance of all the
little things that lead in the inevitable, the future.
If, now, T thwarted her, she would . . . what
would she do? She would have to begin all over
again. She wouldn't want to be revenged; she
wasn't revengeful. But how if she would never
lock upon me again?

The thing had reduced itself to a mere matter
of policy. Or was it passion?

A clatter of the wheels of heavy carts and of
the hoofs of heavy horses on granite struck like
hammer blows on my ears, coming from the well
of the court-yard below. Soane had finished his
bottle and was walking to the cupboard. He
paused at the window and stood looking down.

" Strong beggars, those porters," he said; " I
couldn't carry that weight of paper — not with
my rot on it, let alone Callan's. You'd think it
would break down the carts."

I understood that they were loading the carts

[2871

THE INHERITORS

for the newspaper mails. There was still time to
stop them. I got up and went toward the win-
dow, very swiftly. I was going to call to them
to stop loading. I threw the casement open.

Of course, I did not stop them. The solution
flashed on me with the breath of the raw air. It
was ridiculously simple. If I thwarted her, well,
she would respect me. But her business in life
was the inheritance of the earth, and, however
much she might respect me — or by so much the
more — ^she would recognise that I was a force to
deflect her from the right line — "a disease for
me," she had said.

" What I have to do," I said, " is to show her
that . . . that I had her in my hands and that
I co-operated loyally."

The thing was so simple that I triumphed;
triumphed with the full glow of wine, triumphed
looking down into that murky court-yard where
the lanthorns danced about in the rays of a great
arc lamp. The gilt letters scattered all over the
windows blazed forth the names of Fox's innum-
erable ventures. Well, he ... he had been
a power, but I triumphed. I had co-operated

[288]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

loyally with the powers of the future, though I
wanted no share in the inheritance of the earth.
Only, I was going to push into the future. One
of the great carts got into motion amidst a shower
of sounds that whirled upward round and round
the well. The black hood swayed like the shoul-
ders of an elephant as it passed beneath my feet
under the arch. It disappeared — ^it was co-
operating too ; in a few hours people at the other
end of the country— of the world — would be rais-
ing their hands. Oh, yes, it was co-operating
loyally.

I closed the window. Soane was holding a
champagne bottle in one hand. In the other he
had a paper knife of Fox's — a metal thing, a
Japanese dagger or a Deccan knife. He sliced
the neck off the bottle.

" Thought you were going to throw yourself
out," he said; " I wouldn't stop you. Fm sick of
it . . . sick."

" Look at this . . . to-night . . . this
infernal trick of Fox's . . . And I helped
too . . . Why? .^^ • I must eat." He
paused "... and drink," he added. " But
there is starvation for no end of fools in this little

[289]

THE INHERITORS

move. A few will be losing their good names
too ... I don't care, I'm off . . . By-the-
by c : What is he doing it for ? Money ? Funk ?
— You ought to know. You must be in it too.
It's not hunger with you. Wonderful what peo-
ple will do to keep their pet vice going . . .
Eh? " He swayed a little. " You don't drink—
what's your pet vice? "

He looked at me very defiantly, clutching
the neck of the empty bottle. His drunken and
overbearing glare seemed to force upon me a
complicity in his squalid bargain with life, re-
warded by a squalid freedom. He was pitiful
and odious to my eyes; and somehow in a mo-
ment he appeared menacing.

** You can't frighten me," I said, in response to
the strange fear he had inspired. " No one can
frighten me now." A sense of my inaccessibility
was the first taste of an achieved triumph. I
had done with fear. The poor devil before me
appeared infinitely remote. He was lost; but
he was only one of the lost; one of those that I
could see already overwhelmed by the rush from
the flood-gates opened at my touch. He would
be destroyed in good company; swept out of my

[290]

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

sight together with the past they had known and
with the future they had waited for. But he was
odious. " I am done with you," I said.

" Eh; what? . . . Who wants to frighten?
, . . I wanted to know what's your pet vice
. . . Won't tell? You might safely — Fm off
. . . No . . . Want to tell me mine? . . .
No time . . . I'm off . . • Ask the police-
man . . . crossing sweeper will do . • .
I'm going."

" You will have to," I said.

" What . . . Dismiss me? . . . Throw
the indispensable Soane overboard like a
squeezed lemon? . . . Would you? . . . What
would Fox say? ... Eh? But you can't, my
boy — not you. Tell you . . . tell you . . .
can't . . . Beforehand with you . . . sick
of it . . . Fm off ... to the Islands — the
Islands of the Blest . . . I'm going to be an
. . . no, not an angel like Fox ... an
. . . oh, a beachcomber. Lie on white sand,
in the sun . . . blue sky and palm-trees —
eh? . . . S. S. Waikato. Fm off . . . Come
. too . . . lark . . . dismiss yourself out of
all this. Warm sand, warm, mind you . . .

[291]

THE INHERITORS

you won't?" He had an injured expression.
" Well, Fm off. See me into the cab, old chap,
you're a decent fellow after all . . . not one
of these beggars who would sell their best friend
. . . for a little money . . . or some woman.
Will see the last of me . . ."

I didn't believe he would reach the South Seas,
but I went downstairs and watched him march up
the street with a slight stagger under the pallid
dawn. I suppose it was the lingering chill of the
night that made me shiver. I felt unbounded
confidence in the future, there was nothing now
between her and me. The echo of my footsteps
on the flagstones accompanied me, filling the
empty earth with the sound of my progress.

l^I

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I WALKED along, got to my club and up-
stairs into my room peaceably. A feeling
of entire tranquillity had come over me. I
rested after a strife which had issued in a victory
whose meaning was too great to comprehend
and enjoy at once. I only knew that it was great
because there seemed nothing more left to do.
Everything reposed within me — even conscience,
even memory, reposed as in death. I had risen
above them, and my thoughts moved serenely
as in a new light, as men move in sunshine above
the graves of the forgotten dead. I felt like a
man at the beginning of a long holiday — ^an in-
definite space of idleness with some great felicity
— a felicity too great for words, too great for joy
— at the end. Everything was delicious and
vague ; there were no shapes, no persons. Names
flitted through my mind — Fox, Churchill, my
aunt; but they were living people seen from
above, flitting in the dusk, without individuality;

[293I

THE INHERITORS

things that moved below me in a valley from
which I had emerged. I must have been dream-
ing of them.

I know I dreamed of her. She alone was
distinct among these shapes. She appeared
dazzling; resplendent with a splendid calmness,
and I braced myself to the shock of love, the love
I had known, that all men had known; but
greater, transcendental, almost terrible, a fit re-
ward for the sacrifice of a whole past. Suddenly
she spoke. I heard a sound like the rustling of
a wind through trees, and I felt the shock of an
unknown emotion made up of fear and of enthusi-
asm, as though she had been not a woman but
only a voice crying strange, unknown words in
inspiring tones, promising and cruel, without any
passion of love or hate. I listened. It was like
the wind in the trees of a little wood. No hate
. . . no love. No love. There was a crash
as of a falling temple. I was borne to the earth,
overwhelmed, crushed by an immensity of ruin
and of sorrow. I opened my eyes and saw the
sun shining through the window-blinds.

I seem to remember I was surprised at it. I
don't know why. Perhaps the lingering effect

[294I

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

of the ruin in the dream, which had involved sun-
shine itself. I liked it though, and lay for a
time enjoying the — ^what shall I say? — usualness
of it. The sunshine of yesterday — of to-morrow.
It occurred to me that the morning must be far
advanced, and I got up briskly, as a man rises
to his work. But as soon as I got on my legs I
felt as if I had already over-worked myself. In
reality there was nothing to do. All my muscles
twitched with fatigue. I had experienced the
same sensations once after an hour's desperate
swimming to save myself from being carried out
to sea by the tide.

No. There was nothing to do. I descended
the staircase, and an utter sense of aimlessness
drove me out through the big doors, which
swung behind me without noise. I turned toward
the river, and on the broad embankment the sun-
shine enveloped me, friendly, familiar, and warm
like the care of an old friend. A black dumb
barge drifted, clumsy and empty, and the solitary
man in it wrestled with the heavy sweep, strain*
ing his arms, throwing his face up to the sky at
every effort. He knew what he was doing,
though it was the river that did his work for him.

i 295 ]

THE INHERITORS

His exertions impressed me with the idea that
I too had something to do. Certainly I had.
One always has. Somehow I could not remem-
ber. It was intolerable, and even alarming, this
blank, this emptiness of the many hours before
night came again, till suddenly, it dawned upon
me I had to make some extracts in the British
Museum for our " Cromwell" Our Cromwell.
There was no Cromwell ; he had lived, had worked
for the future — ^and now he had ceased to exist.
His future — our past, had come to an end. The
barge with the man still straining at the oar had
gone out of sight under the arch of the bridge,
as through a gate into another world. A bizarre
sense of solitude stole upon me, and I turned
my back upon the river as empty as my day.
Hansoms, broughams, streamed with a continu-
ous muffled roll of wheels and a beat of hoofs. A
big dray put in a note of thunder and a clank of
chains. I found myself curiously unable to un-
derstand what possible purpose remained to keep
them in motion. The past that had made them
had come to an end, and their future had been
devoured by a new conception. And what of
Churchill? He, too, had worked for the future;

[296]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

he would live on^ but he had already ceased to
exist. I had evoked him in this poignant
thought and he came not alone. He came with
a train of all the vanquished in this stealthy, un-
seen contest for an immense stake in which I was
one of the victors. They crowded upon me. I
saw Fox, Polehampton, de Mersch himself,
crowds of figures without a name, women with
whom I had fancied myself in love, men I had
shaken by the hand. Lea's reproachful, ironical
face. They were near; near enough to touch;
nearer. I did not only see them, I absolutely felt
them all. Their tumultuous and silent stir seemed
to raise a tumult in my breast.

I sprang suddenly to my feet — a sensation that
I had had before, that was not new to me, a re-
membered fear, had me fast ; a remembered voice
seemed to speak clearly incomprehensible words
that had moved me before. The sheer faces of
the enormous buildings near at hand seemed to
topple forwards like cliffs in an earthquake, and
for an instant I saw beyond them into unknown
depths that I had seen into before. It was as
if the shadow of annihilation had passed over
them beneath the sunshine, Then they re*

1^7]

THE INHERITORS

turned to rest; motionless^ but with a changed
aspect.

" This is too absurd," I said to myself, " I am
not well." I was certainly unfit for any sort of
work. " But I must get through the day some-
how." To-morrow . . . to-morrow ...
I had a pale vision of her face as it had appeared
to me at sunset on the first day I had met her.

I went back to my club — to lunch, of course.
I had no appetite, but I was tormented by the
idea of an interminable afternoon before me. I
sat idly for a long time. Behind my back two
men were talking.

" Churchill ... oh, no better than the rest.
He only wants to be found out. If Fve any nose
for that sort of thing, there's something in the
air. It's absurd to be told that he knew nothing
about it. . . . You've seen the Hour? " I
got up to go away, but suddenly found myself
standing by their table.

" You are unjust," I said. They looked up at
me together with an immense surprise. I didn't
know them and I passed on. But I heard one of
them ask:

" Who's that fellow? " . . .

[298]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

" Oh — ^Etchingham Granger . . ."

" Is he queer? " the other postulated.

I went slowly down the great staircase. A
knot of men was huddled round the tape machine;
others came, half trotting, half walking, to peer
over heads, under arm-pits.

" What's the matter with that thing? " I asked
of one of them.

" Oh, Grogram's up," he said, and passed me.
Someone from a point of vantage read out :

" The Leader of the House (Sir C Grogram,
Devonport) said that . ^ ." The words came
haltingly to my ears as the man's voice followed
the jerks of the little instrument ". . . the
Government obviously could not . . . alter
its policy at . . . eleventh hour ... at
dictates of . . . quite irresponsible person
in one of . . . the daily . . . papers."

I was wondering whether it was Soane or Cal-
kn who was poor old Grogram's ** quite irre-
sponsible person," when I caught the sound of
Gurnard's name. I turned irritably away. I
didn't want to hear that fool read out the words
of that ... It was like the warning croak
of a raven in an old ballad.

[«99l

THE INHERITORS

I began desultorily to descend to the smoking*
room. In the Cimmerian gloom of the stairway
the voice of a pursuer hailed me.

" I say, Granger ! I say. Granger ! "

I looked back. The man was one of the rats of
the lower journalism, large-boned, rubicund, asth-
matic; a mass of flesh that might, to the advan-
tage of his country and himself, have served as a
cavalry trooper. He puffed stertorously down
towards me.

'' I say, I say," his breath came rattling and
wheezing. " What's up at the Hour? *'

" I'm sure I don't know," I answered curtly.

**They said you took it yesterday. You've
been playing the very devil, haven't you? But I
suppose it was not off your own bat? '^

" Oh, I never play off my own bat," I an-
swered.

" Of course I don't want to intrude," he said
again. In the gloom I was beginning to discern
the workings of the tortured apoplectic face.
" But, I say, what's de Mersch's little game? "

" You'd better ask him," I answered. It was
incredibly hateful, this satyr's mask in the dim
light.

[300]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"He's not in London," it answered, with a
wink of the creased eyelids, " but, I suppose, now.
Fox and de Mersch haven't had a row, now, have
they? "

I did not answer. The thing was wearily hate-
ful, and this was only the beginning. Hundreds
more would be asking the same question in a few
minutes.

The head wagged on the mountainous shoul-
ders.

" Looks fishy," he said. I recognised that, to
force words from me, he was threatening a kind
of blackmail. Another voice began to call from
the top of the stairs —

" I say, Granger ! I say, Granger . . ."

I pushed the folding-doors apart and went
slowly down the gloomy room. I heard the
doors swing again, and footsteps patter on the
matting behind me. I did not turn; the man
came round me and looked at my face. It
was Polehampton. There were tears in his
eyes.

" I say," he said, " I say, what does it mean;
what does it mean? " It was very difficult for me
to look at him. " I tell you . . ." he began

[301]

THE INHERITORS

again. He had the dictatorial air of a very small,
quite hopeless man, a man mystified by a blow
of unknown provenance. " I tell you . . ."
he began again.

"But what has it to do with me?" I said
roughly.

" Oh, but you . . . you advised me to buy."
He had become supplicatory. " Didn't you, now?
. . . Didn't you . . . You said, you re-
member . . . that ..." I didn't answer
the man. What had I got to say? He remained
looking intently at me, as if it were of the great-
est moment to him that I should make the ac-
knowledgment and share the blame — ^as if it
would take an immense load from his shoulders.
I couldn't do it ; I hated him.

" Didn't you," he began categorically; " didn't
you advise me to buy those debentures of de
Mersch's? " I did not answer.

" What does it all mean? " he said again. " If
this bill doesn't get through, I tell you I shall be
ruined. And they say that Mr. Gurnard is going
to smash it. They are all saying it, up there;
and that you — ^you on the Hour ... are
. • . are responsible." He took out a hand-

I302]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

kerchief and began to blow his nose. I didn't
say a single word.

" But what's to be done? " he started again;
" what's to be done ... I tell you . . . My
daughter, you know, she's very brave, she said
to me this morning she could work; but she
couldn't, you know; she's not been brought up
to that sort of thing . . . not even type-
writing . . . and so . . . we're all ruined
. . . everyone of us. And I've more than fifty
hands, counting Mr. Lea, and they'll all have to
go. It's horrible ... I trusted you, Granger,
you know; I trusted you, and they say up there
that you ..." I turned away from him. I
couldn't bear to see the bewildered fear in his
eyes. " So many of us," he began again, " every-
one I know ... I told them to buy and
. . . But you might have let us know. Gran-
ger, you might have. Think of my poor daugh-
ter."

I wanted to say something to the man, wanted
to horribly; but there wasn't anything; to say —
not a word. I was sorry. I took up a paper
that sprawled on one of the purple ottomans.
I stood with my back to this haggard man and
pretended to read.

[303]

THE INHERITORS

I noticed incredulously that I was swaying on
my legs. I looked round me. Two old men were
asleep in armchairs under the gloomy windows.
One had his head thrown back, the other was
crumpled forward into himself; his frail, white
hand just touched the floor. A little further off
two young men were talking; they had the air
of conspirators over their empty coffee cups.

I was conscious that Polehampton had left me,
that he had gone from behind me; but I don't
think I was conscious of the passage of time.
God knows how long I stood there. Now and
then I saw Polehampton's face before my eyes,
with the panic-stricken eyes, the rufHed hair, the
lines of tears seaming the cheeks, seeming to
look out at me from the crumple of the paper
that I held. I knew too, that there were faces
like that everywhere ; everywhere, faces of panic-
stricken little people of no more account than
the dead in graveyards, just the material to
make graveyards, nothing more; little people of
absolutely no use but just to suffer horribly from
this blow coming upon them from nowhere. It
had never occurred to me at the time that their
iliheritance had passed to me . . . to us,

I304J

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

And yet, I began to wonder stupidly, what was
the difference between me to-day and me yester-
day. There wasn't any, not any at all. Only
to-day I had nothing more to do.

The doors at the end of the room flew open,
as if burst by a great outcry penetrating from
without, and a man appeared running up the
room — one of those men who bear news eter-
nally, who catch the distant clamour and carry
it into quiet streets. Why did he disturb me?
Did I want to hear his news? I wanted to think
of Churchill; to think of how to explain. . . •
The man was running up the room.

" I say ... I say, you beggars . . ."
I was beginning to wonder how it was that I
felt such an absolute conviction of being alone,
and it was then, I believe, that in this solitude
that had descended upon my soul I seemed to
see the shape of an approaching Nemesis. It
is permitted to no man to break with his past,
with the past of his kind, and to throw away the
treasure of his future. I began to suspect I had
gained nothing; I began to understand that even
such a catastrophe was possible. I sat down in
the nearest chair. Then my fear passed away.

[305]

THE INHERITORS

The room was filling; it hummed with excited
voices. " Churchill ! No better than the others/*
I heard somebody saying. Two men had stopped
talking. They were middle-aged, a little gray,
and ruddy. The face of one was angry, and of
the other sad. *' He wanted only to be found
out. What a fall in the mud." " No matter,"
said the other, " one is made a little sad. He
stood for everything I had been pinning my
faith to." They passed on. A brazen voice bel*
lowed in the distance. ** The greatest fall of any
minister that ever was." A tall, heavy journalist
in a white waistcoat was the centre of a group
that turned slowly upon itself, gathering bulk.
" Done for — stood up to the last. I saw him
get into his brougham. The police had a job
. . . There's quite a riot down there . . .
Pale as a ghost. Gurnard? Gurnard magnifi-
cent. Very cool and in his best form. Threw
them over without as much as a wink. Out-
raged conscience speech. Magnificent. Why
it's the chance of his life." . . . And then for
a time the voices and the faces seemed to pass
away and die out. I had dropped my paper, and
as I stooped to pick it up the voices returned.

[306]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

— "Granger . . . Etchingham Granger
• • . Sister is going to marry Gurnard.'*

I got on to my hands and knees to pick up
the paper, of course. What I did not under-
stand was where the water came from. Other-
wise it was pretty clear. Somebody seemed to
be in a fit. No, he wasn't drunk; look at his
teeth. What did they want to look at his teeth
for; was he a horse?

It must have been I that was in the fit. There
were a lot of men round me, the front row on
their knees — holding me, some of them. A man
in a red coat and plush breeches — sl waiter — ^was
holding a glass of water; another had a small
bottle. They were talking about me under their
breaths. At one end of the horseshoe someone
said:

" He's the man who . . ." Then he caught
my eye. He lowered his voice, and the abomin-
able whisper ran round among the heads. It was
easy to guess : " the man who was got at." I
was to be that for the rest of my life. I was to be
famous at last. There came the desire to be out
of it

[307I

THE INHERITORS

I struggled to my feet.

Someone said: "Feel better now?" I an-
swered : " I— oh, I've got to go and see . . ."

It was rather difficult to speak distinctly; my
tongue got in the way. But I strove to im-
press the fool with the idea that I had affairs
that must be attended to — that I had private
affairs.

" You aren't fit. Let me . . ."

I pushed him roughly aside — ^what business
was it of his? I slunk hastily out of the room.
The others remained. I knew what they were
going to do— to talk things over, to gabble about
" the man who . . ."

It was treacherous walking, that tessellated
pavement in the hall. Someone said : . " Hullo,
Granger," as I passed. I took no notice.

Where did I wish to go to? There was no one
who could minister to me; the whole world had
resolved itself into a vast solitary city of closed
doors. I had no friend — no one. But I must go
somewhere, must hide somewhere, must speak
to someone. I mumbled the address of Fox to
a cabman. Some idea of expiation must have
been in my mind; some idea of seeing the thing

[308]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

through, mingled with that necessity for talking
to someone — anyone.

I was afraid too; not of Fox's rage; not even
of anything that he could do— but of the sight
of his despair. He had become a tragic figure.

I reached his flat and I had said : " It is I,"
and again, " It is I," and he had not stirred.
He was lying on the sofa under a rug, motion-
less as a corpse. I had paced up and down
the room. I remember that the pile of the
carpet was so long that it was impossible to
walk upon it easily. Everything else in the
room was conceived in an exuberance of luxury
that now had something of the macabre in it.
It was that now— before, it had been unclean.
There was a great bed whose lines suggested
sinking softness, a glaring yellow satin coverlet,
vast, like a sea. The walls were covered with
yellow satin, the windows draped with lace worth
a king's ransom, the light was softened, the air
dead, the sounds hung slumbrously. And, in the
centre of it, that motionless body. It stirred,
pivoted on some central axis beneath the rug,
and faced me sitting. There was no look of en-
quiry in the bloodshot eyes — ^they turned dully

[309]

THE INHERITORS

upon me^ topaz-coloured in a blood-red setting.
There was no expression in the suffused face.

"You want?" he said, in a voice that was
august by dint of hopelessness.

" I want to explain," I said. I had no idea
that this was what I had come for.

He answered only : " You ! " He had the air
of one speaking to something infinitely unim-
portant. It was as if I had no inkling of the real
issue.

With a bravery of desperation I began to ex-
plain that I hadn't stumbled into the thing; that
I had acted open-eyed; for my own ends . . .
"My own ends." I repeated it several times.
I wanted him to understand, and I did explain.
I kept nothing from him; neither her coming,
nor her words, nor my feelings. I had gone in
with my eyes open.

For the first time Fox looked at me as if I
were a sentient being. " Oh, you know that
much," he said listlessly.

" It's no disgrace to have gone under to her,"
I said; " we had to." His despair seemed to link
him into one " we " with myself. I wanted to
put heart into him. I don't know why.

[310]

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

He didn't look at me again.

" Oh, that;' he said dully, " I— I understand
who you mean ... If I had known before
I might have done something. But she came
of a higher plane." He seemed to be talking
to himself. The half-forgotten horror grew
large; I remembered that she had said that
Fox, like herself, was one of a race apart, that
was to supersede us — ^Dimensionists. And, whea
I looked at him now, it was plain to me that
he was of a race different to my own, just as he
had always seemed different from any other man.
He had had a different tone in triumph; he was
different now, in his despair. He went on : "I
might have managed Gurnard alone, but I never
thought of her coming. You see one does one's
best, but, somehow, here one grows rather blind.
I ought to have stuck to Gurnard, of course.;
never to have broken with him. We ought all
to have kept together, — ^But I kept my end up
as long as he was alone.^'

He went on talking in an expressionless
monotone, perhaps to himself, perhaps to me.
I listened as one listens to unmeaning sounds —
to that of a distant train at night. He was look-

THE INHERITORS

ing at the floor, his ttiouth movifig mechanically.
He sat perfectly squate, one hand on either kne^
his back bowed out, his head drooping forward.
It was as if there were no more muscular force
in the whole man — ^as if he were one of those
ancient things one seed sunning themselves on
betiches by the walls of workhouses.

" But," I said angrily, " it's not all over, you
can make a fight for it still."

" You don't seem to understand," he answered,
" ft is all over — the whole thing. I ran Churchill
and his conscious rectitude gang for all they
were worth . . . Well, I liked them, I was
a fool to give way to pity. — But I did* — One
grows weak among people like you. Of course
I knew that their day was over . . . And
it's all over^'' he said again after a long
pause.

" And what will you dof " I asked, half hys-
terically.

" I don't just know," he answ^^; " we'vf
tipne of us gone under before. There haven't
been enough really to clash until she came."

The dead tranquillity of his manner was over-
whelming; there was nothing to be said. I waa

Ui2]

(
1

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

in the presence of a man who was not as I was,
whose standard of values, absolute to himself,
was not to be measured by any of mine.

" I suppose I shall cut my throat," he began
again.

I noticed with impersonal astonishment that
the length of my right side was covered with the
dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came
opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number
of tiny, jewelled frames, containing daubs of an
astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful.
What kind of a being could conceive this im-
possibly barbaric room, could enshrine those im-
possibly crude designs, and then fold his hands?
I turned fiercely upon him. " But you are rich
enough to enjoy life," I said.

" What's that? " he asked wearily.

" In the name of God," I shouted, " what do
you work for — what have you been plotting and
plotting for, if not to enjoy your life at the last? "
He made a small indefinite motion of ignoranct)
as if I had propounded to him a problem that he

could not solve, that he did not think worth the
solving.
Tt came to me as the confirmation of a sua-

1 3t3 1

THE INHERITORS

picion — that motion. They had no joy, these
people who were to supersede us; their clear-
sightedness did nothing more for them than just
that enabling them to spread desolation among
us and take our places. It had been in her
manner all along, she was like Fate; like the
abominable Fate that desolates the whole length
of our lives; that leaves of our hopes, of our
plans, nothing but a hideous jumble of frag-
ments like those of statues, smashed by ham-
mers; the senseless, inscrutable, joyless Fate
that we hate, and that debases us forever and
ever. She had been all that to me . . . and
to how many more?

" I used to be a decent personality," I vocifer-
ated at him. " Do you hear — decent. I could
look a man in the face. And you cannot even
enjoy. What do you come for? What do you
live for? What is at the end of it all? "

" Ah, if I knew . . ." he answered, neg li«
gently.

l3H]

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I WANTED to sec her, to finish it one way
or another, and, at my aunt's house, I
found her standing in an immense white
room; waiting for me. There was a profusion
of light. It left her absolutely shadowless, like
a white statue in a gallery; inscrutable.

" I have come," I said. I had it in my mind
to say: "Because there is nothing for me to
do on earth." But I did not, I looked at her
instead.

" You have come," she repeated. She had no
expression in her voice, in her eyes. It was as
if I were nothing to her; as if I were the picture
of a man. Well, that was it; I was a picture,
she a statue. *' I did it," I said at last.

" And you want? " she asked.

" You know," I answered, *' I want my . . ."
I could not think of the word. It was either a
reward or a just due. She looked at me, quite
suddenly. It made an effect as if the Venus of

[315]

THE INHERITORS

Milo had turned its head toward me. She be*
gan to speak, as if the statue were speaking, as
if a passing bell were speaking; recording a
passing passionlessly.

"You have done nothing at all/* she said.
''Nothing."

"And yet," I said, "I was at the heart
of it all"

" Nothing at all," she repeated. " You were
at the heart, yes; but at the heart of a machine."
Her words carried a sort of strong conviction.
I seemed suddenly to see an immense machine
— unconcerned, soulless, but all its parts made
up of bodies of men : a great mill grinding out
the dust of centuries; a great wine-press. She
was continuing her speech.

"As for you — ^you are only a detail, like all
the others; you were set in a place because you
would act as you did. It was in your character.
We inherit the earth and you, your day is over
• . . You remember that day, when I found
you — ^the first day? "

I remembered that day. It was on the down-
land, under the immense sky, amid the sound of
larks. She had explained the nature of things.

[316]

CHAPTER NINETEEN

She had talked expressionlessly in pregnant
words; she was talking now. I knew no more
of her to-day, after all these days, after I had
given up to her my past and my future.

" You remember that day. I was looking for
such a man^ and I found you."

"And you ..." I said, "you have done
this thing ! Think of it ! ... I have nobody
— ^nothing — ^nowhere in the world, I cannot
look a man in the face, not even Churchill. I
can never go to him again." I paused, expect-
ing a sign of softening. None came. " I have
parted with my past and you tell me there is no
future."

" None," she echoed. Then, coldly, as a swan
takes the water, she began to speak :

" Well, yes ! I've hurt you. You have suffered
and in your pain you think me vile, but remember
that for ages the virtue of to-morrow has been
the vileness of to-day. That which outstrips
one, one calls vile. My virtue lies in gaining my
end. Pity for you would have been a crime for
me. You have suffered. And then? What
are you to me ? As I came among you I am to-
day; that is where I am triumphant and virtu-

[317I

THE INHERITORS

ous. I have succeeded. When I came here
I came into a world of— of shadows of men.
What were their passions, their joys, their fears,
their despair, their outcry, to me? If I had ears,
my virtue was to close them to the cries. There
was no other way. There was one of us — ^your
friend Fox, I mean. He came into the world,
but had not the virtue to hold himself aloof.
He has told you, ' One goes blind down here.*
He began to feel a little like the people round
him. He contracted likings and dislikings. He
liked you . . . and you betrayed him. So
he went under. He grew blind down here. I
have not grown blind. I see as I saw. I move
as I did in a world of ... of the pictures
of men. They despair. I hear groans . . •
well, they are the groans of the dead to me.
This to you, down near it, is a mass of tortu-
ous intrigue; vile in its pettiest detail. But
come further off; stand beside me, and what
does it look like? It is a mighty engine of
disintegration. It has crushed out a whole fab-
ric, a whole plane of society. It has done that.
I guided it. I had to have my eyes on every
little strand of it; to be forever on the watch.

[318I

J

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"And now I stand alone. Yesterday that
fabric was everything to you; it seemed solid
enough. And where is it to-day? What is it
to you more than to me? There stood Virtue
. . . and Probity . . . and all the things
that all those people stood for. Well, to-day
they are gone; the very belief in them is gone.
Who will believe in them, now that it is proved
that their tools were people . • . like de
Mersch? And it was I that did it. That, too,
is to be accounted to me for virtue.

" Well, I have inherited the earth. I am the
worm at the very heart of the rose of it. You
are thinking that all that I hav« gained is the
hand of Gurnard. But it is more than that.
It is a matter of a chess-board; and Gurnard is
the only piece that remains. And I am the hand
that moves him. As for a marriage; well, it is
a marriage of minds, a union for a common pur-
pose. But mine is the master mind. As for
you. Well, you have parted with your past
• . . and there is no future for you. That is
true. You have nowhere to go to; have noth-
ing left, nothing in the world. That is true
too. But what is that to me? A set of fact&—

1 319 1

THE INHERITORS

that you have parted with your past and have
no future. You had to do the work; I had to
make you do it. I chose you because you
would do it That is all ... I knew you;
knew your secret places, your weaknesses. That
is my power. I stand for the Inevitable, for the
future that goes on its way; you for the past that
lies by the roadside. If for your sake I had
swerved one jot from my allotted course, I should
have been untrue. There was a danger, once,
for a minute. . . . But I stood out against it.
What would you have had me do? Go under as
Fox went under? Speak like him, look as he
looks now ... Me? Well, I did not.

** I was in the hands of the future; I never
swerved; I went on my way. I had to judge
men as I judged you; to corrupt, as I corrupted
you. I cajoled; I bribed; I held out hopes;
and with every one, as with you, I succeeded. It
is in that power that the secret of the greatness
which is virtue, lies. I had to set about a work
of art, of an art strange to you; as strange, as
alien as the arts of dead peoples. You are the
dead now, mine the art of an ensuing day. All
that remains to you is to fold your hands and

1 320]

CHAPTER NINETEEN

wonder, as you wondered before the gates of
Nineveh. I had to sound the knell of the old
order; of your virtues, of your honours, of your
faiths, of ... of altruism, if you like. Well,
it is sounded. I was forever on the watch; I
foresaw; I forestalled; I have never rested. And
you ..."
"And I . . ." I said, *' I only loved you.''
There was a silence. I seemed for a moment
to see myself a tenuous, bodiless thing, like a
ghost in a bottomless cleft between the past
and the to come. And I was to be that for*

ever.

You only loved me," she repeated. " Yes,
you loved me. But what claim upon me does
that give you? You loved me. . . . Well,
if I had loved you it would have given you a
claim. ... All your misery; your heart-ache
comes from . . . from love; your love for me,
your love for the things of the past, for what was
doomed. . . . You loved the others too • . .
in a way, and you betrayed them and you are
wretched. If you had not loved them you would
not be wretched now; if you had not loved me
you would not have betrayed your^— your very

[ 321 ]

THE INHERITORS

self. At the first you stood alone; as mucK
alone as I. All these people were nothing to
you. I was nothing to you. But you must
needs love them and me. You should have let
them remain nothing to the end. But you did
not. What were they to you? — ^Shapes, shadows
on a sheet. They looked real. But were they
— ^any one of them? You will never see them
again; you will never see me again; we shall
be all parts of a past of shadows. If you had
been as I am, you could have looked back upon
them unmoved or could have forgotten. . . .
But you . . . ' you only loved ' and you will
have no more ease. And, even now, it is only
yourself that matters. It is because you broke;
because you were false to your standards at a
supreme moment; because you have discovered
that your honour will not help you to stand a
strain. It is not the thought of the harm you
have done the others . . . What are they —
what is Qiurchill who has fallen or Fox who is
dead — ^to you now? It is yourself that you be-
moan. That IS your tragedy, that you can never
go again to Churchill with the old look in your
eyes, that you can never go to anyone for fear

CHAPTER NINETEEN

of contempt. • . , Oh, I know you, I know
you."

She knew me. It was true, what she said.

I had had my eyes on the gpround all this
while; now I looked at her, trying to realise that
I should never see her again. It was impossible.
There was that intense beauty, that shadowless-
ness that was like translucence. And there was
her voice. It was impossible to understand that
I was never to see her again, never to hear her
voice, after this.

She was silent for a long time and I said noth*
ing — nothing at all. It was the thought of her
making Fox's end; of her sitting as Fox had
sat, hopelessly, lifelessly, like a man waiting at
the end of the world. At last she said : " There
is no hope. We have to go our ways; you
yours, I mine. And then if you will — ^if you
cannot forget — ^you may remember that I cared;
that, for a moment, in between two breaths, I
thought of ... of failing. That is ill I can
do ... for your sake."

That silenced me. Even if I could have
spoken to any purpose, I would have held my
tongue now.

[ 323 J

THE INHERITORS

I had not looked at her; but stood with my
eyes averted, very conscious of her standing be-
fore me; of her great beauty, of her great glory.

After a long time I went away. I never saw
her again. I never saw any one of them all
again. Fox was dead and Giurchill I have never
had the heart to face. That was the end of all
that part of my life. It passed away and left me
only a consciousness of weakness and . . .
and regrets. She remains. One recognises her
hand in the trend of events. Well, it is not a
very gay world. Gurnard, they say, is the type
of the age — of its spirit. And they say that I,
the Granger of Etchingham, am not on terms
with my brothers-in-law.

[3*41

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